iversideIBiographjcal Series 



il d 


■ WILLIAM 


■ 


P E Nf Nf 


5-1 

'Z 


B 



H68, 



GEORGE HODGES 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

^liJ^p.-v-- Copyright i\o. 

8helf.,MM. 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



^1)t 0i\jer?ibe "^Sioorapbical ^tx\t0 



ANDREW JACKSON, by W. G. Brown 
JAMES B. EADS, by Louis How 
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, by Paul E. Morb 
PETER COOPER, by R. W. Raymond 
THOMAS JEFFERSON, by H. C. Mkrwin 
WILLIAM PENN, by Gborgb Hodges 
GENERAL GRANT. {In preparation) 
LEWIS AND CLARK, by Wiluam R. Ligh- 

TON . ( In preparation) 
Each about loo pages, i6mo, with photogravure 

portrait, 75 cents ; School Edition, 50 cents, 

net 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
Boston and New York 



tlClfte m\)mirit Biograptiical ^txit& 

NUMBER 6 

WILLIAM PENN 

BY 

GEORGE HODGES 



WILLIAM PENN 



BY 



GEORGE HODGES 



i^ 



^ 




HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

Boston: 4 Park Street ; New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street 
Chicago: 378-388 Wabash Avenue 



1 



Libr'«*ry of Concire8>3 

FEB 7 1901 

Copyright antry 

SECOND COPY 






COPYRIGHT, 190I, BY GEORGE HODGES 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. A Puritan Boyhood : Wanstead Church 

AND Chigwell School .... 1 
II. At Oxford : Influence of Thomas Loe 8 
III. In France and Ireland : The World 

AND THE Other World ... 22 
rV. Penn becomes a Quaker: Persecution 

AND Controversy 33 

V. The Beginning of Penn's Political 

Life : The Holy Experiment . . 58 
VI. The Settlement of Pennsylvania: 

Penn's First Visit to the Province 68 
Vn. At the Court of James the Second, 

AND " IN Retirement " . . . .93 
VIII. Penn's Second Visit to the Province : 

Closing Years 113 



WILLIAM PENN 



A PURITAN boyhood: WANSTEAD CHURCH 
AND CHIGWELL SCHOOL 

The mother of William Penn came from 
Rotterdam, in Holland. She was the daugh- 
ter of John Jasper, a merchant of that city. 
The lively Mr. Pepys, who met her in 1664, 
when William was twenty years of age, 
describes her as a " fat, short, old Dutch- 
woman," and says that she was "mighty 
homely." He records a tattling neighbor's 
gossip that she was not a good housekeeper. 
He credits her, however, with having more 
wit aud discretion than her husband, and 
liked her better as his acquaintance with 
her progressed. That she was of a cheerful 
disposition is evidenced by many passages 



2 WILLIAM PENN 

of Pepys's Diary. That is all we know about 
her. 

William's father was an ambitious, suc- 
cessful, and important person. He was 
twenty-two years old, and already a captain 
in the navy, when he married Margaret 
Jasper. The year after his marriage he was 
made rear-admiral of Ireland ; two years 
after that, admiral of the Straits ; in four 
years more, vice-admiral of England ; and 
the next year, a *' general of the sea " in 
the Dutch war. This was in Cromwell's 
time, when the naval strength of England 
was being mightily increased. A young man 
of energy and ability, acquainted with the 
sea, was easily in the line of promotion. 

The family was ancient and respectable. 
Penn's father, however, began life with little 
money or education, and few social advan- 
tages. Lord Clarendon observed of him that 
he " had a great mind to appear better bred, 
and to speak like a gentleman," implying 
that he found some difficulty in so doing. 
Clarendon said, also, that he ''had many 
good words which he used at adventure." 



A PURITAN BOYHOOD 3 

The Penns lived on Tower Hill, in the 
Parish of St. Catherine's, in a court adjoin- 
ing London Wall. There they resided in 
"two chambers, one above another," and 
fared frugally. There William was born 
on the 14th of October, 1644. 

Marston Moor was fought in that year, 
and all England was taking sides in the con- 
tention between the Parliament and the 
king. The navy was in sympathy with the 
Parliament ; and the young officer, though 
his personal inclinations were towards the 
king, went with his associates. But in 
1654 he appears to have lost faith in the 
Commonwealth. Cromwell sent an expedi- 
tion to seize the Spanish West Indies. He 
put Penn in charge of the fleet, and made 
Venables general of the army. The two 
commanders, without conference one with 
the other, sent secret word to Charles II., 
then in exile on the Continent, and offered 
him their ships and soldiers. This transac- 
tion, though it seemed for the moment to be 
of none effect, resulted years afterward in 
the erection of the Colony of Pennsylvania. 



4 WILLIAM PENN 

Charles declined the offer ; " he wished them 
to reserve their affections for his Majesty 
till a more proper season to discover them;" 
but he never forgot it. It was the begin- 
ning of a friendship between the House of 
Stuart and the family of Penn, which Wil- 
liam Penn inherited. 

The expedition captured Jamaica, and 
made it a British colony; but in its other 
undertakings , it failed miserably ; and the 
admiral, on his return, was dismissed from 
the navy and committed to the Tower. 

About that same time, the admiral's 
young son, being then in the tweKth year 
of his age, beheld a vision. His mother had 
removed with him to the village of Wan- 
stead, in Essex. Here, as he was alone in 
his chamber, "he was suddenly surprised 
with an inward comfort, and, as he thought, 
an external glory in his room, which gave 
rise to religious emotions, during which he 
had the strongest conviction of the being of 
a God, and that the soul of man was capa- 
ble of enjoying communication with him. 
He believed, also, that the seal of Divinity 



WANSTEAD CHURCH 5 

had been put upon him at this moment, or 
that he had been awakened or called upon 
to a holy life." 

While William Penn the elder had been 
going from promotion to promotion, sailing 
the high seas, and fighting battles with the 
enemies of England, William Penn the 
younger had been hving with all possible 
quietness in the green country, saying his 
prayers in Wan stead Church, and learning 
his lessons in Chigwell School. 

Wanstead Church was devotedly Puri- 
tan. The chief citizens had signed a protest 
against any " Popish innovations," and had 
agreed to punish every offender against " the 
true reformed Protestant religion." 

The founder of Chigwell School had pre- 
scribed in his deed of gift that the master 
should be "a good Poet, of a sound reli- 
gion, neither Papal nor Puritan ; of a good 
behaviour ; of a sober and honest conversa- 
tion ; no tippler nor haunter of alehouses, 
no puffer of tobacco ; and, above all, apt to 
teach and severe in his government." Here 
William studied Lilly's Latin and Cleonard's 



f) WILLIAM PENN 

Greek Grammar, together with "cypher- 
ing and casting-up accounts," being a good 
scholar, we may guess, in the classics, but 
encountering the master's " severe govern- 
ment " in his sums. Chigwell was as Puri- 
tan a place as Wanstead. About the time of 
William's going thither, the vicar had been 
ejected on petition from the parishioners, 
who complained that he had an altar before 
which he bowed and cringed, and which he 
had been known to kiss " twice in one day." 

It is plain that religion made up a large, 
interesting, and important part of life in 
these villages in which William Penn was 
getting his first impressions of the world. 
All about were great forests, whose shadows 
invited him to seclusion and meditation. All 
the news was of great battles, most of them 
fought in a religious cause, which even a 
lad could appreciate, and towards which he 
would readily take an attitude of stout par- 
tisanship. The boy was deeply affected by 
these surroundings. " I was bred a Protest- 
ant," he said long afterwards, " and that 
strictly, too." Trained as he was in Puritan 



CHIGWELL SCHOOL 7 

habits of introspection, he listened for the 
voice of God, and heard it. Thus the tone 
of his life was set. There were moments in 
his youth when " the world," as the phrase 
is, attracted him ; there were times in his 
great career when he seemed, and perhaps 
was, disobedient to this heavenly vision ; 
but, looking back from the end of his life to 
this beginning, '' as a tale that is told," it is 
seen to be hved throughout in the light of 
the glory which shone in his room at Wan- 
stead. William Penn from that hour was 
a markedly religious man. Thereafter, no- 
thing was so manifest or eminent about him 
as his religion. 



II 

AT OXFOKD : INFLUENCE OF THOMAS LOE 

On the 2 2d of April, 1661, we get an- 
other glunpse of William. 

Mr Pepys, having risen early on the 
morning of that day, and put on his velvet 
coat, and made himself, as he says, as fine 
as he could, repaired to Mr. Young's, the 
flag-maker, in Cornhill, to view the proces- 
sion wherein the king should ride through 
London. There he found " Sir W. Pen and 
his son, with several others." " We had a 
good room to ourselves," he says, "with 
wine and good cake, and saw the show very 
weU." The streets were new graveled, and 
the fronts of the houses hung with carpets, 
with ladies looking out of all the windows ; 
and " so glorious was the show with gold 
and silver, that we were not able to look at 
it, our eyes at last being so overcome." 

This was a glory very different from that 



AT OXFORD 9 

which the lad had seen, five or six years be- 
fore, in his room. The world was here pre- 
senting its attractions in competition with 
the ^' other world " of the earlier vision. 
The contrast is a symbol of the contention 
between the two ideals, into which William 
was immediately to enter. 

The king and the Duke of York had 
looked up as they passed the flag-maker's, 
and had recognized the admiral. He had 
gone to Ireland, upon his release from the 
Tower, and had there resided in retirement 
upon an estate which his father had owned 
before him. Thence returning, as the Resto- 
ration became more and more a probability, 
he had secured a seat in Parliament, and 
had been a bearer of the welcome message 
which had finally brought Charles from his 
exile in Holland to his throne in England. 
For his part in this pleasant errand, he had 
been knighted and made Commissioner of 
Admiralty and Governor of Kinsale. Thus 
his ambitions were being happily attained. 
He had retrieved and improved his fortunes, 
and had become an associate with persons 
of rank and a favorite with royalty. 



10 WILLIAM PENN 

He had immediately sent his son to Ox- 
ford. "William had been entered as a gen- 
tleman-commoner of Christ Church, at the 
beginning of the Michaelmas term of 1660. 
It was clearly the paternal intention that 
the boy should become a successful man of 
the world and courtier, like his father. 

Sir William, however, had not reflected 
that while he had been pursuing his career 
of calculating ambition and seeking the 
pleasure of princes, his son had been living 
amongst Puritans in a Puritan neighbor- 
hood. Young Penn went up to Oxford to 
find all things in confusion. The Puritans 
had been put out of their places, and the 
Churchmen were entering in. It is likely that 
this, of itself, displeased the new student, 
whose sympathies were with the dispossessed. 
The Churchmen, moreover, brought their 
cavalier habits with them. In the reaction 
from the severity which they had just es- 
caped, they did many objectionable things, 
not only for the pleasure of doing them, but 
for the added joy of shocking their Puritan 
neighbors. They amused themselves freely 



INFLUENCE OF THOMAS LOE 11 

on the Lord's day ; they patronized games 
and plays ; and they tippled and " puffed 
tobacco," and swore and swaggered in all 
the newest fashions. William was the son 
of his father in appreciation of pleasant 
and abundant living. But he was not of a 
disposition to enter into this wanton and 
audacious merry-making, — a gentle, serious 
country lad, with a Puritan conscience. 

Moreover, at this moment, in the face 
of any possible temptation, William's sober 
tastes and devout resolutions were strength- 
ened by certain appealing sermons. Here 
it was at Oxford, the nursery of enthusiasms 
and holy causes, that he received the im- 
pulse which determined all his after life. 
He spent but a scant two years in college ; 
and the work of the lecture rooms must 
have suffered seriously during that time 
from the contention and confusion of the 
changes then in progress ; so that academ- 
ically the college could not have greatly 
profited him. The profit came in the influ- 
ence of Thomas Loe. Loe was a Quaker. 

The origin of the name " Quaker " is un- 



12 WILLIAM PENN 

certain. It is derived by some from the fact 
that the early preachers of the sect trembled 
as they spoke ; others deduce it from the 
trembling which their speech compelled in 
those who heard it. By either derivation, it 
indicates the earnest spirit of that strange 
people who, in the seventeenth century, were 
annoying and displeasing all their neighbors. 
George Fox, the first Quaker, was a cob- 
bler; and the first Quaker dress was the 
leather coat and breeches which he made for 
himself with his own tools. Thereafter he was 
independent both of fashions and of tailors. 
Cobbler though he was, and so slenderly 
educated that he did not express himself 
grammatically. Fox was nevertheless a pro- 
phet, according to the order of Amos, the 
herdman of Tekoa. He looked out into the 
England of his day with the keenest eyes of 
any man of the times, and remarked upon 
what he saw with the most honest and candid 
speech. A man of the plain people, like 
most of the prophets and apostles, the of- 
fenses which chiefly attracted his attention 
were such as the plain people naturally see. 



INFLUENCE OF THOMAS LOE 13 

Out of the windows of his cobbler's shop, 
Fox beheld with righteous indignation the 
extravagant and insincere courtesies of the 
gentlefolk, and heard their exaggerated 
phrases of compliment. In protest against 
the unmeaning courtesies, he wore his hat in 
the presence of no matter whom, taking it off 
only in time of prayer. In protest against 
the unmeaning compliments, he addressed 
no man by any artificial title, calling all his 
neighbors, without distinction of persons, 
by their Christian names ; and for the plural 
pronoun "you," the plural of dignity and 
flattery, he substituted "thee" and "thou." 

The same hteralness appeared in his selec- 
tion of " Swear not at all " as one of the 
cardinal commandments, and in his applica^ 
tion of it to the oaths of the court and of 
the state. The Sermon on the Mount has in 
all ages been considered difficult to enact in 
common life, but it would have been hard 
to find any sentence in it which in the days 
of Fox and Penn, with their interpretation, 
would have brought upon a conscientious 
person a heavier burden of inconvenience. 



14 WILLIAM PENN 

Not only did it make the Quakers guilty of 
contempt of court and thus initially at fault 
in all legal business, but it exposed them to a 
natural suspicion of disloyalty to the govern- 
ment. It was a time of political change, first 
the Commonwealth, then Charles, then James, 
then William; and every change signified 
the supremacy of a new idea in religion, 
Puritan, Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Pro- 
testant. Every new ruler demanded a new 
oath of allegiance ; and as plots and conspir- 
acies were multiplied, the oath was required 
again and again ; so that England was like 
an unruly school, whose master is continually 
calling upon the pupils to declare whether or 
no they are guilty of this or that offense. 
The Quakers were forbidden by their doctrine 
of the oath to make answer in the form which 
the state required. And they suffered for 
this scruple as men have suffered for the 
maintenance of eternal principles. 

To the social eccentricity of the irremove- 
able hat and the singular pronoun, and to the 
civil eccentricity of the refused oath, George 
Fox and his disciples added a series of pro- 



INFLUENCE OF THOMAS LOE 15 

tests against the most venerable customs 
of Christianity. They did away with all the 
forms and ceremonies of Churclmaan and 
of Puritan alike. Not even baptism, not 
even the Lord's Supper remained. Their 
service was a silent meeting, whose solemn 
stillness was broken, if at all, by the voice 
of one who was sensibly '* moved " by the 
Spirit of God. They discarded all orders of 
the ministry. They refused alike all creeds 
and all confessions. 

Not content with thus abandoning most 
that their contemporaries valued among the 
institutions of religion, the Quakers made 
themselves obtrusively obnoxious. They 
argued and exhorted, in season and out 
of season ; they printed endless pages of 
eager and violent controversy; they went 
into churches and interrupted services and 
sermons. 

Amongst these various denials there were 
two positive assertions. One was the doctrine 
of the return to primitive Christianity ; the 
other was the doctrine of the inward light. 
Let us get back, they said, to those blessed 



16 WILLIAM PENN 

centuries when the teaching of the Apostles 
was remembered, and the fellowship of the 
Apostles was faithfully kept, — when Justin 
Martyr and Irenseus and Ignatius and the 
other holy fathers lived. And let us listen 
to the inner voice ; let us live in the illumina- 
tion of the light which lighteth every man, 
and attend to the counsels of that Holy 
Spirit whose ministrations did not cease with 
the departure of the last Apostle. God, they 
believed, spoke to them directly, and told 
them what to do. 

George Fox, in 1656, had brought this 
teaching to Oxford ; and among the company 
of Quakers which had thus been gathered 
under the eaves of the university, Thomas Loe 
had become a " public Friend," or, as would 
commonly be said, a minister. When Wil- 
liam Penn entered Christ Church College, 
Loe was probably in the town jail. It is 
at least certain that he was imprisoned there, 
with forty other Quakers, sometime in 1660. 

To Loe's preaching many of the students 
listened with attention. It is easy to see how 
his doctrines would appeal to young manhood. 



INFLUENCE OF THOMAS LOE 17 

The fact that they were forbidden would at- 
tract some, and that the man who preached 
thus had suffered for his faith would attract 
others. Their emphasis upon entire sincerity 
and consistency in word and deed would 
commend them to honest souls, while the 
exaltation of the inward light would move 
then, as in all ages, the idealists, the poets, 
the enthusiasts among them. William Penn 
knew what the inward light was. He had 
seen it shining so that it filled all the room 
where he was sitting. Accordingly, he not 
only went to hear Loe speak but was pro- 
foundly impressed by what he heard. 

If Penn was naturally a religious per- 
son, — by inheritance, perhaps, from his 
mother, — he was also naturally of a politi- 
cal mind, by inheritance from his father. 
What Loe said touched both sides of this 
inheritance. For the Quakers had already 
begun to dream of a colony across the sea. 
The Churchmen had such a colony in Vir- 
ginia ; the Puritans had one in Massa- 
chusetts ; somewhere else in that untilled 
continent there must be a place for those 



18 WILLIAM PENN 

who in England could expect no peace 
from either Puritan or Churchman. Not 
only had they planned to have sometime a 
country of their own, but they had already 
located it. They had chosen the lands wliich 
lay behind the Jerseys. While Loe was 
preaching and Penn was listening, Fox 
was writing to Josiah Cole, a Quaker who 
was then in America, asking him to confer 
with the chiefs of the Susquehanna Indians. 
This plan Loe revealed to his student con- 
gregation. It appealed to Penn. He had an 
instinctive appreciation of large ideas, and 
an imagination and confidence which made 
him eager to undertake their execution. It 
was in his blood. It was the spirit which 
had carried his father from a lieutenancy 
in the navy to the position of an honored 
and influential member of the court. " I 
had an opening of joy as to these parts," he 
says, meaning Pennsylvania, "in 1661, at 
Oxford." 

This meeting with Loe was therefore a 
crisis in Penn's life. Wilham Penn will 
always be remembered as a leader among 



INFLUENCE OF THOMAS LOE 19 

the early Quakers, and as the founder of a 
commonwealth. He first became acquainted 
with the Quakers, and first conceived the 
idea of founding at Oxford, or assisting to 
found, a commonwealth, by the preaching of 
Thomas Loe. 

It is a curious fact that the spirit of pro- 
test will often pass by serious offenses and 
fasten upon some apparently slight occasion 
which has rather a sjrmbolical than an ac- 
tual importance. William Penn, so far as 
we know, endured the disorders of anti- 
Puritan Oxford without protest. He entered 
so far into the life of the place as to con- 
tribute, with other students, to a series of 
Latin elegies upon the death of the Duke 
of Gloucester ; and he " delighted," An- 
thony Wood tells us, " in manly sports at 
times of recreation." It is true that he may 
have written to his father to take him away, 
for Mr. Pepys records in his journal, under 
date of Jan. 25, 1662, " Sir W. Pen came 
to me, and did break a business to me 
about removing his son from Oxford to 
Cambridge, to some private college." But 



20 WILLIAM PENN 

nothing came of it. William is said, indeed, 
to have absented himself rather often from 
the college prayers, and to have joined with 
other students whom the Quaker preaching 
had affected in holding prayer-meetings in 
their own rooms. But all went fairly well 
until an order was issued requiring the stu- 
dents, according to the ancient custom, to 
wear surplices in chapel. Then the young 
Puritan arose, and assisted in a ritual re- 
bellion. He and his friends " fell upon those 
students who appeared in surplices, and he 
and they together tore them everywhere 
over their heads." Not content with thus 
seizing and rending the obnoxious vestments, 
they proceeded further to thrust the white 
gowns into the nearest cesspool, into whose 
depths they poked them with long sticks. 

This incident ended WiUiam's course at 
college. It is doubtful whether he was ex- 
pelled or only suspended. He was dismissed, 
and never returned. Eight years after, 
chancing to pass through Oxford, and learn- 
ing that Quaker students were still sub- 
jected to the rigors of academic discijDline, 



INFLUENCE OF THOMAS LOE 21 

he wrote a letter to the vice-chancellor. It 
probably expresses the sentiments with which 
as an undergi-acluate he had regarded the 
university authorities : " Shall the multi- 
plied oppressions which thou continuest to 
heap upon innocent English people for their 
religion pass unregarded by the Eternal 
God ? Dost thou think to escape his fierce 
wi'ath and dreadful vengeance for thy un- 
godly and illegal persecution of his poor 
children ? I tell thee, no. Better were it 
for thee thou hadst never been born." And 
so on, in the controversial dialect of the 
time, calling the vice-chancellor a " poor 
mushroom," and abusing him generally. 
Elsewhere, in a retrospect which I shall 
presently quote at length, he refers to his 
university experiences : " Of my persecu- 
tion at Oxford, and how the Lord sustained 
me in the midst of that hellish darkness 
and debauchery ; of my being banished the 
college." 



Ill 



IN FKANCE AND IRELAND : THE WORLD AND 
THE OTHER WORLD 

In his retrospect of his early life, Penn 
notes what immediately followed his depar- 
ture from the university : " The bitter usage 
I underwent when I returned to my father, — 
whipping, beating, and turning out of doors 
in 1662." 

The admiral was thoroughly angry. He 
was at best but imperfectly acquainted with 
his son, of whom in his busy life he had 
seen but little, and was therefore unpre- 
pared for such extraordinary conduct. He 
was by no means a religious person. For 
the spiritual, or even the ecclesiastical, as- 
pects of the matter, he cared nothing. But 
he had, as Clarendon perceived, a strong 
desire to be well thought of by those who 
composed the good society of the day. He 



IN FRANCE AND IRELAND 23 

expected the members of his family to 
deport themselves as befitted such society. 
And here was WiUiam, whom he had care- 
fully sent to a college where he would natu- 
rally consort with the sons of titled families, 
taking up with a religious movement which 
would bring him into the company of cob- 
blers and tinkers. It is said, indeed, that 
Robert Spencer, afterwards Earl of Sunder- 
land, helped William destroy the surplices. 
But this is denied ; and even if it were 
true, it would be plain, from Spencer's after 
career, that he did it not for the principle, 
but for the fun of the thing. William was 
in the most sober earnest. Accordingly, the 
admiral turned his son out of doors. 

The boy came back, of course. Beating 
and turning out of doors were not such seri- 
ous events in the seventeeenth century as 
they would be at present. Most men said 
more, and in louder voices, and meant less. 
It was but a brief quarrel, and father and 
son made it up as best they could. It was 
plain, however, that something must be done. 
Whipping would not avail. WiUiam's head 



24 WILLIAM PENN 

was full of queer notions, upon wliich a 
stick had no effect. His father bethought 
himself of the pleasant diversions of France. 
The lad, he said, has lived in the country 
all his days, and has had no acquaintance 
with the merry world ; he shall go abroad, 
that he may see life, and learn to behave 
like a gentleman ; let us see if this will not 
cure him of his pious follies. 

Accordingly, to France the young man 
went, and traveled in company with certain 
persons of rank. He stayed more than a 
year, and enjoyed himself greatly. He was 
at the age when all the world is new and 
interesting ; and being of attractive appear- 
ance and high spirits, with plenty of money, 
the world gave him a cordial welcome. So 
far did he venture into the customs of the 
country, that he had a fight one night in 
a Paris street with somebody who crossed 
swords with him, and disarmed his antago- 
nist. He had a right, according to the rules, 
to kill him, but he declined to do so. When 
he came home, he pleased his father much 
by his graceful behavior and elegant attire. 



IN FRANCE AND IRELAND 2r, 

" This day," says Mr. Pep3^s in liis diary for 
August 26, 1G64, "my wife tells me that 
Mr. Pen, Sir William's son, is come back 
from France, and came to visit her. A 
most modish person grown, she says, a fine 
gentleman." Pepys thinks that he is even 
a bit too French in his manner and con- 
versation. 

" I remember your honour very well," 
writes a correspondent years after, " when 
you came newly out of France, and wore 
pantaloon breeches." 

This journey affected Penn all the rest of 
his life. It restrained him from following 
the absurder singularities of his associates. 
George Fox's leather suit he would have 
found impossible. He wore his hat in the 
Quaker way, and said " thee " and " thou," 
but otherwise he appears to have dressed 
and acted according to the conventions of 
polite society. He did, indeed, become a 
Quaker ; but there were always Quakers 
who looked askance at him because he was 
so different from them, able to speak French 
and acquainted with the manners of draw- 
ing-rooms. 



26 WILLIAM PENN 

In two respects, however, his visit to 
France differed from that of some of his 
companions in traveL There were places to 
which they went without him ; and there 
were places to which he went without them. 
He kept liimseK from the grosser tempta- 
tions of the country. "You have been as 
bad as other folks," said Sir John Robinson 
when Penn was on trial for preaching in the 
street. 

"When," cried Penn, "and where? I 
charge thee tell the company to my face." 

" Abroad," said Robinson, " and at home, 
t»o." 

" I make this bold challenge," answered 
Penn, "to all men, women and children 
upon earth, justly to accuse me with ever 
having seen me drunk, heard me swear, 
utter a curse, or speak one obscene word 
(much less that I ever made it my prac- 
tice). I speak this to God's glory, that has 
ever preserved me from the power of those 
pollutions, and that from a child begot an 
hatred in me towards them." 

He went away alone for some months to 



IN FRANCE AND IRELAND 27 

the Protestant college of Saumur, where he 
devoted himself to a study of that primitive 
Christianity in which, as Loe had told him, 
was to be found the true ideal of the Chris- 
tian Church. Here he acquired an ac- 
quaintance with the writings of the early 
Fathers, from whom he liked to quote. 

Thus he returned to England in 1664, 
attired in French pantaloon breeches, and 
with little French affectations in his man- 
ner, but without vices, and with a smatter- 
ing of patristic learning. He was sent by 
his father to study law at Lincoln's Inn. 
He was to be a courtier, and in that posi- 
tion it would be both becoming and con- 
venient to have some knowledge of the law. 
Thus he settled down among the lawyers, 
and it seemed for the moment as if his 
father had succeeded in his purpose. It 
seemed as if the world had effectually ob- 
scured the other world. 

There are two letters, written about this 
time from William to his father, which show 
a pleasant mixture of piety with a Hvely in- 
terest in the life about him. He has been 



28 WILLIAM PENN 

at sea for a few days with the admiral, and 
returns with dispatches to the king. " I 
bless God," he writes, " my heart does not 
in any way fail, but firmly believe that if 
God has called you out to battle, he will 
cover your head in that smoky day." He 
hastened on his errand, he says, to White- 
hall, and arrived before the king was up ; but 
his Majesty, learning that there was news, 
" earnestly skipping out of bed, came only 
in his gown and slippers ; who, when he 
saw me, said, ' Oh ! is 't you ? How is Sir 
William?'" 

That was in May. Within a week the 
plague came. On the 7th of June, 1665, 
Mr. Pepys makes this ominous entry: 
" This day," he says, " much against my 
will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three 
houses marked with a red cross upon the 
doors, and ' Lord, have mercy,' written there ; 
which was a sad sight to me, being the first 
of the kind that, to my remembrance, I 
ever saw." Day by day the pestilence in- 
creased, and presently there was no more 
studying at Lincoln's Inn. Young Penn 



IN FRANCE AND IRELAND 29 

went for safety into the clean country. 
There, among the green fiehls, in the en- 
forced leisure, with time to think, and the 
most sobering things to think about, his old 
seriousness returned. The change was so 
marked that his father, feeling that it were 
well to renew the pleasant friendship with 
the world which had begun in France, sent 
him over to Ireland. 

At Dublin, the Duke of Ormond, the 
Lord Lieutenant, was keeping a merry 
court. William entered heartily into its 
pleasures. He resided upon his father's es- 
tates, at Shannagarry Castle. He so dis- 
tinguished himseK in the suppression of a 
mutiny that Ormond offered him a com- 
mission in the army, and William was dis- 
posed to accept it. He had his portrait 
painted, clad in steel, with lace at his throat. 
His dark hair is parted in the middle, and 
hangs in cavalier fashion over his shoulders. 
He looks out of large, clear, questioning 
eyes ; and his handsome face is strong and 
serious. 

But the young cavalier went one day to 



30 WILLIAM PENN 

Cork upon some business, and there heard 
that Thomas Loe was in town, and that he 
was to preach. Penn went to hear him, and 
again the spoken word was critical and de- 
cisive. " There is a faith," said the preacher, 
"which overcomes the world, and there is 
a faith which is overcome by the world." 
Such was the theme, and it seemed to Penn 
as if every word were spoken out of heaven 
straight to his own soul. In the long con- 
tention which had been going on within him 
between the world and the other world, 
the world had been getting the mastery. 
The attractions of a martial life had shone 
more brightly than the light which had flamed 
about him in his boyhood. Then Loe spoke, 
and thenceforth there was no more perplexity. 
Penn's choice was definitely made. 

In his account of his travels in Holland 
and Germany, written some ten years after 
this crisis, Penn recurs to it in an address 
from which I have already quoted. He was 
speaking in Wiemart, at a meeting in the 
mansion-house of the Somerdykes, and was 
illustrating his exhortations from his own 



IN FRANCE AND IRELAND 31 

experience. He passed in rapid review the 
incidents of his early life which we have re- 
counted. " Here I began to let them know," 
he says, " how and where the Lord first ap- 
peared unto me, which was about the twelfth 
year of my age, in 1656 ; how at times, betwixt 
that and the fifteenth, the Lord visited me, 
and the divine impressions he gave me of 
himself." Then the banishment from Oxford, 
and his father's turning him out of doors. 
" Of the Lord's dealings with me in France, 
and in the time of the great plague in Lon- 
don, in fine, the deep sense he gave me of 
the vanity of this world, of the deep irre- 
ligiousness of the religions of it ; then of 
my mournful and bitter cries to him that he 
would show me his own way of life and salva- 
tion, and my resolution to follow him, what- 
ever reproaches or sufferings should attend 
me, and that with great reverence and ten- 
derness of spirit ; how, after all this, the glory 
of the world overtook me, and I was even 
ready to give myself up unto it, seeing as yet 
no such thing as the ' primitive spirit and 
church ' upon earth, and being ready to faint 



32 WILLIAM PENN 

concerning my ' liope of the restitution of all 
tilings.' It was at this time that the Lord 
visited me with a certain sound and testimony 
of his eternal word, through one of them the 
world calls Quakers, namely, Thomas Loe." 
Struggling, as Penn was, against contin- 
ual temptations to abandon his high ideal, 
getting no help from his parents, who were 
displeased at him, nor from the clergy, whose 
" invectiveness and cruelty " he remembers, 
nor from his companions, who made them- 
selves strange to him ; bearing meanwhile 
"• that great cross of resisting and watching 
against mine own inward vain affections 
and thoughts," the only voice of help and 
strength was that of Thomas Loe. Seeking 
for the " primitive spirit and church upon 
earth," he found it in the sect which Loe 
represented. His mind was now resolved. 
He, too, would be a Quaker. 



IV 



PENN BECOMES A QUAKER: PERSECUTION 
AND CONTROVERSY 

William now began to attend Quaker 
meetings, though he was still dressed in the 
gay fashions which he had learned in France. 
His sincerity was soon tested. A proclama- 
tion made against Fifth Monarchy men was 
so enforced as to affect Quakers. A meeting 
at which Penn was present was broken in 
upon by constables, backed with soldiers, who 
" rudely and arbitrarily " required every 
man's appearance before the mayor. Among 
others, they " violently haled " Penn. From 
jail he wrote to the Earl of Orrery, Lord 
President of Munster, making a stout protest. 
It was his first public utterance. " Diversities 
of faith and conduct," he argued, " contribute 
not to the disturbance of any place, where 
moral conformity is barely requisite to pre- 
serve the peace." He reminded his lordship 



34 WILLIAM PENN 

that he himself had not long since " concluded 
no way so effectual to improve or advantage 
this country as to dispense with freedom 
[i. e. to act freely] in all things pertaining 
to conscience." 

Penn wrote so much during his long life 
that his selected works make five large vol- 
umes. Many of these pages are devoted to 
the statement of Quaker theology ; some are 
occupied with descriptions of his colonial pos- 
sessions ; some are given to counsels and con- 
clusions drawn from experience and dealing 
with human life in general ; but there is one 
idea which continually recurs, — sometimes 
made the subject of a thesis, sometimes enter- 
ing by the way, — and that is the popular 
right of liberty of conscience. It was for this 
that he worked, and chiefly lived, most of his 
life. Here it is set forth with all clearness 
in the first public word which he wrote. 

William's letter opened the jail doors. 
It is likely, however, that the signature was 
more influential than the epistle ; for his 
Quaker associates seem not to have come 
out with him. The fact which probably 



PENN BECOMES A QUAKER 35 

weighed most with the Lord President was 
that Penn was the son of his father the 
admiral, and the protege of Ormond. His 
father called him home. It was on the 3d 
of September that William was arrested; 
on the 29th of December, being the Lord's 
day, Mrs. Turner calls upon Mr. and Mrs. 
Pepys for an evening of cheerful conversa- 
tion, "and there, among other talk, she 
tells me that Mr. William Pen, who has 
lately come over from Ireland, is a Quaker 
again, or some very melancholy thing ; that 
he cares for no company, nor comes into 
any." 

Admiral Penn was sorely disappointed. 
Neither France nor Ireland had availed to 
wean his son from his religious eccentrici- 
ties. Into the pleasant society where his 
father had hoped to see him shine, he de- 
clined to enter. He said " thee " and " thou," 
and wore his hat. Especially upon these 
points of manners, the young man and his 
father held long discussions. The admiral 
insisted that WiUiam should refrain from 
making himself socially ridiculous ; though 



36 WILLIAM PENN 

even here he was willing to make a reasonable 
compromise. " You may ' thee ' and ' thou ' 
whom you please," he said, "except the 
king, the Duke of York, and myself." But 
the young convert dechned to make any 
exceptions. 

Thereupon, for the second time, the ad- 
miral thrust his son out of the house. The 
Quakers received him. He was thenceforth 
accounted among them as a teacher, a 
leader : in their phrase, a " public Friend." 
This was in 1668, when he was twenty-four 
years old. 

The work of a Quaker minister, at that 
time, was made interesting and difficult not 
only by the social and ecclesiastical preju- 
dices against which he must go, but by cer- 
tain laws which limited free speech and free 
action. The young preacher speedily made 
himself obnoxious to both these kinds of 
laws. Of the three years which followed, 
he spent more than a third of the time in 
prison, being once confined for saying, and 
twice for doing, what the laws forbade. 

The religious world was filled with con- 



PERSECUTION AND CONTROVERSY 37 

troversy. There were discussions in the 
meeting-houses ; and a constant stream of 
pamphlets came from the press, part argu- 
ment and part abuse. Even mild-man- 
nered men called each other names. The 
Quakers found it necessary to join in this 
rough give-and-take, and Penn entered at 
once into this vigorous exercise. He began 
a long series of like documents with a tract 
entitled " Truth Exalted." The intent of it 
was to show that Roman Catholics, Church- 
men, and Puritans alike were all shamefully 
in error, wandering in the blackness of 
darkness, given over to idle superstition, 
and being of a character to correspond with 
their fond beliefs ; meanwhile, the Quakers 
were the only people then resident in Chris- 
tendom whose creed was absolutely true and 
their lives consistent with it. 

" Come," he says, " answer me first, you 
Papists, where did the Scriptures enjoin 
baby-baptism, churching of women, marry- 
ing by priests, holy water to frighten the 
devil? Come now, you that are called Pro- 
testants, and first those who are called Epis- 



38 WILLIAM PENN 

copalians, where do the Scriptures own such 
persecutors, false prophets, tithemongers, 
deniers of revelations, opposers of perfec- 
tion, men-pleasers, time-servers, unprofitable 
teachers ? " The Separatists are similarly 
cudgeled : they are " groveling in beggarly 
elements, imitations, and shadows of heav- 
enly things." 

Presently, a Presbyterian minister named 
Vincent attacked Quakerism. Joseph Besse, 
Penn's earliest biographer, says that Vin- 
cent was " transported with fiery zeal ; " 
which, as he remarks in parenthesis, is " a 
thing fertile of ill language." Penn chal- 
lenged him to a public debate ; and, this 
not giving the Quaker champion an oppor- 
tunity to say all that was in his mind, he 
wrote a pamphlet, called " The Sandy Foun- 
dation Shaken." The full title was much 
longer than this, in the manner of the 
time, and announced the author's purpose 
to refute three " generally believed and ap- 
plauded doctrines : first, of one God, subsist- 
ing in three distinct and separate persons ; 
second, of the impossibility of divine pardon 



PERSECUTION AND CONTROVERSY 39 

without the making of a complete satisfac- 
tion ; and third, of the justification of im- 
pure persons by an imputed righteousness." 
Penn's handling of the doctrine of the 
Trinity in this treatise gave much offense. 
He had taken the position of his fellow- 
religionists, that the learning of the schools 
was a hindrance to religion. He sought to 
divest the great statements of the creed 
from the subtleties of mediaeval pliilosophy. 
He purposed to return to the Scripture 
itseK, back of all councils and formulas. 
Asserting, accordingly, the being and unity 
of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, he so re- 
fused all the conventional phrases of the 
theologians as to seem to them to reject the 
doctrine of the Trinity itself. He did deny 
" the trinity of distinct and separate persons 
in the .unity of essence." If the word " per- 
son " has one meaning, Penn was right ; if 
it has another meaning, he was wrong. If 
a " person " is an individual, then the asser- 
tion is that there are three Gods ; but if 
the w^ord signifies a distinction in the divine 
nature, then the unity of God remains. As 



40 WILLIAM PENN 

so often happens in doctrinal contention, he 
and his critics used the same words with 
different definitions. The consequence was 
that the bishop of London had him put in 
prison. He was restrained for seven months 
in the Tower. 

The English prison of the seventeenth 
century was a place of disease of body and 
misery of mind. Penn was kept in close con- 
finement, and the bishop sent him word that 
he must either recant or die a prisoner. " I 
told him," says Penn, " that the Tower was 
the worst argument in the world to convince 
me ; for whoever was in the wrong, those who 
used force for religion could never be in the 
right." He declared that his prison should 
be his grave before he would budge a jot. 
Thus six months passed. 

But the situation was intolerable. It is 
sometimes necessary to die for a difference of 
opinion, but it is not advisable to do so for 
a simple misunderstanding. Penn and the 
bishop were actually in accord. The young 
author therefore wrote an explanation of his 
book, entitled "Innocency with her Open 



PERSECUTION AND CONTROVERSY 41 

Face." At the same time he addressed a let- 
ter to Lord Arlington, principal secretary of 
state. In the letter he maintained that he 
had " subverted no faith, obedience or good 
life," and he insisted on the natural right of 
liberty of conscience : " To conceit," he said, 
" that men must form their faith of things 
proper to another world by the prescriptions 
of mortal men, or else they can have no right 
to eat, drink, sleep, walk, trade, or be at 
liberty and live in this, to me seems both 
ridiculous and dangerous." These writings 
gained him his liberty. The Duke of York 
made intercession for him with the king. 

Penn had occupied himself while in prison 
with the composition of a considerable work, 
called " No Cross, No Crown." It is partly 
controversial, setting forth the reasons for 
the Quaker faith and practice, and partly 
devotional, exalting self-sacrifice, and urging 
men to simpler and more spiritual living. 
Thus the months of his imprisonment had 
been of value both to him and to the reli- 
gious movement with which he had identified 
himself. The Quakers, when Penn joined 



42 WILLIAM PENN 

them, had no adequate literary expression 
of their thought. They were most of them 
intensely earnest but uneducated persons, 
who spoke great truths somewhat incoher- 
ently. Penn gave Quaker theology a sys- 
tematic and dignified statement. 

When he came out of the Tower, he went 
home to his father. The admiral had now 
recovered from his first indignation. Wil- 
liam was still, he said, a cross to him, but he 
had made up his mind to endure it. Indeed, 
the world into which he had desired his son 
to enter was not at that moment treating the 
admiral well. He was suffering impeachment 
and the gout at the same time. He saw that 
William's religion was giving him a serenity 
in the midst of evil fortune which he him- 
self did not possess. He could appreciate 
his heroic spirit. He admired him in spite 
of himself. 

William then spent nearly a year in 
Ireland, administering his father's estates. 
When he returned, in 1670, he found his 
Quaker brethen in greater trouble than be- 
fore. In that perilous season of plots and 



PERSECUTION AND CONTROVERSY 43 

rumors of plots, when Protestants lived in 
dread of Roman Catholics, and Churchmen 
knew not at what moment the Putitans might 
again repeat the tragedies of the Common- 
wealth, neither church nor state dared to take 
risks. The reigns of Mary and of Cromwell 
were so recent an experience, the Papists and 
the Presbyterians were so many and so hostile, 
that it seemed unsafe to permit the assem- 
bling of persons concerning whose intentions 
there could be any doubt. Any company 
might undertake a conspiracy. The result of 
this feeling on the part of both the civil and 
the ecclesiastical authorities was a series of 
ordinances, reasonable enough imder the cir- 
cumstances, and perhaps necessary, but which 
made life hard for such stout and frank dis- 
senters as the Quakers. At the time of 
Penn's return from Ireland, it had been de- 
termined to enforce the Conventicle Act, 
which prohibited all religious meetings except 
those of the Church of England. There was, 
therefore, a general arresting of these suspi- 
cious friends of Penn's. In the middle of the 
summer Penn himself was arrested. 



44 WILLIAM PENN 

The young preacher had gone to a meet- 
ing-house of the Quakers in Gracechurch or 
Gracious Street, in London, and had found 
the door shut, and a file of soldiers barring 
the way. The congregation thereupon held 
a meeting in the street, keeping their custom- 
ary silence until some one should be moved 
to speak. It was not long before the spirit 
moved Penn. He was immediately arrested, 
and William Mead, a linen draper, with him, 
and the two were brought before the mayor. 
The charge was that they " unlawfully and 
tumultuously did assemble and congregate 
themselves together to the disturbance of the 
king's peace and to the great terror and dis- 
turbance of many of his hege people and sub- 
jects." They were committed as rioters and 
sent to await trial at the sign of the Black 
Dog, in Newgate Market. 

At the trial Penn entered the court-room 
wearing his hat. A constable promptly 
pulled it off, and was ordered by the judge 
to rejilace it in order that he might fine the 
Quaker forty marks for keeping it on. Thus 
the proceedings appropriately began. Wil- 



PERSECUTION AND CONTROVERSY 43 

liam tried in vain to learn the terms of the 
law under which he was arrested, maintain- 
ing that he was innocent of any illegal act. 
Finally, after an absurd and unjust hear- 
ing, the jury, who appreciated the situation, 
brought in a verdict of " guilty of speaking 
in Gracious Street." The judges refused to 
accept the verdict, and kept the jury without 
food or drink for two days, trying to make 
them say, " guilty of speaking in Gracious 
Street to an unlawful assembly." At last 
the jury brought in a formal verdict of " not 
guilty," which the court was compelled to 
accept. Thereupon the judges fined every 
juryman forty marks for contempt of court ; 
and Penn and the jurors, refusing to pay 
their fines, were all imprisoned in Newgate. 
The Court of Common Pleas presently re- 
versed the judges' decision and released the 
jury. Penn was also released, against his 
own protest, by the payment of his fine by 
his father. 

The admiral was in his last sickness, ife 
was weary, he said, of the world. It had not 
proved, after all, to be a satisfactory world. 



46 WILLIAM PENN 

He did not grieve now that his son had re- 
nounced it. At the same time, he could not 
help but feel that the friendship of the world 
was a valuable possession ; and he had there- 
fore requested his patron, the Duke of York, 
to be his son's friend. Both the duke and 
the king had promised their good counsel 
and protection. Thus "with a gentle and 
even gale," as it says on his tombstone, " in 
much peace, [he] arrived and anchored in 
his last and best port, at Wanstead in the 
county of Essex, the 16th of September, 
1670, being then but forty-nine years and 
four months old." 

The admiral's death left his son with an 
annual income of about fifteen hundred 
pounds. This wealth, however, made no 
stay in his Quaker zeal. Before the year 
was ended, he was again in prison. 

Sir John Robinson, the lieutenant of the 
Tower, had been one of the judges in the 
affair of Gracious Street. He had either 
taken a dislike to Penn, or else was deeply 
impressed with the conviction that the young 
Quaker was a peril to the state. Finding 



PERSECUTION AND CONTROVERSY 47 

that there was to be a meeting in Wheeler 
Street, at which William was expected, 
he sent soldiers and had him arrested. 
They conveyed him to the Tower, where he 
was examined. " I vow, Mr. Penn," said 
Sir John, " I am sorry for you ; you are 
an ingenious gentleman, all the world must 
allow you, and do allow you, that ; and you 
have a plentiful estate ; why should you 
render yourself unhappy by associating with 
such a simple people ? " That was the sus- 
picious fact. Men in Kobinson's position 
could not understand why Penn should join 
his fortunes with those of people so different 
from himself, poor, ignorant, and obscure, 
unless there were some hidden motive. He 
must be either a political conspirator, or, 
as many said, a Jesuit in disguise, which 
amounted to the same thing. " You do 
nothing," said Sir John, "but stir up the 
people to sedition." He required him to take 
an oath " that it is not lawful, upon any pre- 
tense whatsoever, to take arms against the 
king, and that [he] would not endeavour any 
alteration of government either in church 



48 WILLIAM PENN 

or state." Penn would not swear. He was 
therefore sentenced for six months to New- 
gate. " I wish you wiser," said Robinson. 
" And I wish thee better," retorted Penn. 
" Send a corporal," said the lieutenant, 
" with a file of musqueteers along with 
him." " No, no," broke in Penn, " send thy 
lacquey ; I know the way to Newgate." 

William continued in prison during the 
entire period of his sentence, at fu*st in a 
room for which he paid the jailers, then, by 
his own choice, with his fellow Quakers in 
the "common stinking jail." Even here, 
however, he managed, as before, to write ; 
and he must have had access to books, for 
what he wrote could not have been com- 
posed without sight of the authors from 
whom he quoted. The most important of 
his writings at this time was " The Great 
Case of Liberty of Conscience once more 
briefly Debated and Defended by the Au- 
thority of Eeason, Scripture and Antiquity." 

Being released from prison, Penn set 
out for the Continent, where he traveled 
in Germany and Holland, holding meetings 



PERSECUTION AND CONTROVERSY 49 

as opportunity offered, and regaining such 
strength of body as he may have lost amidst 
the rigors of confinement. 

In 1672, being now back in England, 
and having reached the age of twenty- 
seven years, he married Gulielma Maria 
Springett, a young and charming Quakeress. 
Guli Springett's father had died when he 
was but twenty-three years old, after such 
valiant service on the Parliamentary side 
in the civil war that he had been knighted 
by the Speaker of the House of Commons. 
Her mother, thus bereft, had married Isaac 
Pennington, a quiet country gentleman, in 
whose company, after some search for satis- 
faction in religion, she had become a Quaker. 
Pennington's Quakerism, together with the 
sufferings which it brought upon him, had 
made him known to Penn. It was to him 
that Penn had written, three years before, 
to describe the death of Thomas Loe. " Tak- 
ing me by the hand," said WiUiam, " he 
spoke thus : * Dear heart, bear thy cross, 
stand faithful for God, and bear thy testi- 
mony in thy day and generation ; and God 



50 WILLIAM PENN 

will give thee an eternal crown of glory, that 
none shall ever take from thee. There is 
not another way. Bear thy cross. Stand 
faithful for God.' " 

It was in Pennington's house that Thomas 
Ellwood lived, as tutor to Guli and the 
other children, to whom one day in 1655 
had come his friend John Milton, bringing 
a manuscript for him to read. " He asked 
me how I liked it, and what I thought of it, 
which I modestly but freely told him ; and 
after some further discourse about it, I 
pleasantly said to him. Thou hast said much 
here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou 
to say about Paradise found ? " Whereupon 
the poet wrote his second epic. 

EUwood has left a happy description of 
Guli Si^ringett. " She was in aU respects," 
he says, "a very desirable woman, — whe- 
ther regard was had to her outward person, 
which wanted notliing to render her com- 
pletely comely ; or as to the endowments of 
her mind, which were every way extraor- 
dinary." And he speaks of her " innocent, 
open, free conversation," and of the " abun- 



PERSECUTION AND CONTROVERSY 51 

dant affability, courtesy, and sweetness of 
her natural temper." Her portrait fits with 
this description, showing a bright face in a 
small, dark hood, with a white kerchief over 
her shoulders. Both her ancestry and her 
breeding would dispose her to appreciate 
heroism, especially such as was shown in 
the cause of religion. She found the hero 
of her dreams in William Penn. Thus at 
Amersham, in the spring of 1672, the two 
stood up in some quiet company of Friends, 
and with prayer and joining of hands were 
united in marriage. 

" My dear wife," he WTote to her ten 
years later, as he set out for America, " re- 
member thou hast the love of my youth, and 
much the joy of my life ; the most beloved, 
as well as the most worthy of all earthly 
comforts. God knows, and thou knowest it. 
I can say it was a match of Providence's 
making." 

The Declaration of Indulgence, the king's 
suspension of the penalties legally incurred 
by dissent, came conveniently at this time 
to give them a honeymoon of peace and 



52 WILLIAM PENN 

tranquillity. They took up their residence 
at Rickmansworth, in Hertfordshire. In the 
autumn, William set out again upon his 
missionary journeys, preaching in twenty- 
one towns in twenty-one days. " The Lord 
sealed up our labors and travels," he w^rote 
in his journal, " according to the desire of 
my soul and spirit, with his heavenly re- 
freshments and sweet Hving power and word 
of life, unto the reaching of all, and conso- 
lating our own hearts abundantly." 

So he returned with the blessings of peace, 
" which," as he said, " is a reward beyond 
all earthly treasure." 



THE BEGINNING OF PENN S POLITICAL LIFE : 
THE HOLY EXPERIMENT 

In 1673, George Fox came back from 
his travels in America, and Penn and his 
wife had great joy in welcoming him at 
Bristol. No sooner, however, had Fox ar- 
rived than the Declaration of Indulgence 
was withdrawn. It had met with much 
opposition : partly ecclesiastical, from those 
who saw in it a scheme to reestablish re- 
lations between Rome and England ; and 
partly political, from those who found but 
an ill precedent in a royal decree which set 
aside parliamentary legislation. The reli- 
gious liberty which it gave was good, but 
the way in which that liberty was given was 
bad. What was needed was not " indul- 
gence," but common justice. So the king 
recalled the Declaration, and Parliament 



54 WILLIAM PENN 

being not yet ready to enact its provisions 
into law, the prisons were again filled witli 
peaceable citizens whose offense was their 
religion. One of the first to suffer was Fox, 
and in his behalf Penn went to court. He 
appealed to the Duke of York. 

The incident is significant as the begin- 
ning of another phase of William's life. 
Thus far, he had been a Quaker preacher. 
Though he was unordained, being in a sect 
which made nothing of ordination, he was 
for all practical purposes a minister of the 
gospel. He was the Rev. William Penn. 
But now, when he opened the door of the 
duke's palace, he entered into a new way of 
living, in which he continued during most 
of the remainder of his life. He began to 
be a courtier ; he went into poHtics. He 
was still a Quaker, preaching sermons and 
writing books of theological controversy ; he 
gave up no religious conviction, and abated 
nothing of the earnestness of his personal 
piety ; but he had found, as he believed, 
another and more effective way to serve 
God. He now began to enter into that valu- 



PENN'S POLITICAL LIFE 55 

able but perilous heritage which had been 
left him by his father, the friendship of 
royalty. 

Penn found the duke's antechamber filled 
with suitors. It seemed impossible to get 
into the august presence. But Colonel Ash- 
ton, one of the household, looked hard at 
Penn, and found in him an old companion, 
a friend of the days when William was still 
partaking of the joys of pleasant society. 
Ashton immediately got him an interview, 
and Penn delivered his request for the 
release of Fox. The duke received him 
and his petition cordially, professing liimself 
opposed to persecution for religion's sake, 
and promising to use his influence with the 
king. "Then," says Penn, "when he had 
done upon this affair, he was pleased to take 
a very particular notice of me, both for the 
relation my father had had to his service 
in the navy, and the care he had promised 
to show in my regard upon all occasions." 
He expressed surprise that William had 
not been to see him before, and said that 
whenever he had any business with him. 



56 WILLIAM PENN 

he should have immediate entrance and at- 
tention. 

Fox was not set at liberty by reason of 
this interview. The king was willing to 
pardon Fox, but Fox was not willing to be 
pardoned ; having, as he insisted, done no 
wrong. Penn, however, had learned that 
the royal duke remembered the admi- 
ral's son. It was an important fact, and 
William thereafter kept it well in mind. 
That it was a turning-point in his affairs, 
appears in his reference to it in a letter 
which he wrote in 1688 to a friend who had 
reproached him for his attendance at court. 
" I have made it," he says, " my province 
and business; I have followed and pressed 
it ; I took it for my calling and station, and 
have kept it above these sixteen years." 

Penn went back to Eickmansworth, and 
for a time life went on as before. We get 
a glimpse of it in the good and wholesome 
orders which he established for the well- 
governing of his family. In winter, they 
were to rise at seven ; in summer at five. 
Breakfast was at nine, dinner at twelve, 



PENN'S POLITICAL LIFE 57 

supper at seven. Each meal was preceded by 
family prayers. At the devotions before din- 
ner, the Bible was read aloud, together with 
chapters from the " Book of Martyrs," or 
the writings of Friends. After supper, the 
servants appeared before the master and 
mistress, and gave an account of their do- 
ings during the day, and got their orders 
for the morrow. " They were to avoid loud 
discourse and troublesome noises ; they were 
not to absent themselves without leave ; 
they were not to go to any public house but 
upon business ; and they were not to loiter, 
or enter into unprofitable talk, while on an 
errand." 

With the canceling of the Indulgence, the 
persecution of the Quakers was renewed. 
Their houses were entered, their furniture 
was seized, their cattle were driven away, 
and themselves thrust into jail. When no 
offense was clearly proved against them, 
the oath was tendered, and the refusal to 
take it meant a serious inprisonment. 

Under these circumstances, Penn wrote a 
" Treatise on Oaths." He also addressed the 



58 WILilAM PENN 

general public with " England's Present In- 
terest Considered," an argument against the 
attempt to compel uniformity of belief. He 
petitioned the king and Parliament in " The 
Continued Cry of the Oppressed." " William 
Brazier," he said, " shoemaker at Cambridge, 
was fined by John Hunt, mayor, and John 
Spenser, vice-chancellor, twenty pounds for 
holding a peaceable religious meeting in his 
own house. The officer who distrained for 
this sum took his leather last, the seat he 
worked upon, wearing clothes, bed, and bed- 
ding." " In Cheshire, Justice Daniel of 
Danesbury took from Briggs and others the 
value of one hundred and sixteen pounds, 
fifteen shillings and tenpence in coin, kine, 
and horses. The latter he had the auda- 
city to retain and work for his own use," 
and so on, instance after instance. Penn's 
acquaintance at court and his friendships 
with persons of position never made him an 
aristocrat. He was fraternally interested in 
farmers and cobblers, and cared for the plain 
people. Quakerism, as he held it, was in- 
deed a system of theology which he studi- 



, PENN'S POLITICAL LIFE 59 

ously taught, but it was also, and quite as 
much, a social and intellectual democracy. 
What he mightily liked about it was that 
abandonment of artificial distinctions, where- 
by all Quakers addressed their neighbors by 
their Christian names, and that refusal to 
be held by formulas of faith, whereby they 
were left free to accept such beliefs, and 
such only, as appealed to their own reason. 

About this time he engaged in controversy 
with Mr. Richard Baxter. Baxter is chiefly 
remembered as the author of "The Saints' 
Everlasting Rest," but he was a most mili- 
tant person, who rejoiced greatly in a theo- 
logical fight. Passing by Riclanansworth, 
and finding many Quakers there, — to him a 
sad spectacle, — he sought to reclaim them, 
and thus fell speedily into debate with Penn. 
The two argued from ten in the morning 
until five in the afternoon, a great crowd 
listening all the time with breathless interest. 
Neither could get the other to surrender ; 
but so much did William enjoy the exercise 
that he offered Baxter a room in his house, 
that they might argue every day. 



60 WILLIAM PENN 

In 1677, having now removed to an estate 
of his wife's at Worminghurst, in Sussex, 
Penn, in company with Fox, Barclay, and 
other Quakers, made a " religious voyage " 
into Holland and Germany, preaching the 
gospel. His journal of these travels is 
printed in his works. " At Osnaburg," he 
writes, " we had a little time with the man of 
the inn where we lay ; and left him several 
good books of Friends, in the High and Low 
Dutch tongues, to read and dispose of." 
Then, in the next sentence, he continues, " the 
next morning, being the fifth day of the week, 
we set forward to Herwerden, and came 
thither at night. This is the city where the 
Princess Ehzabeth Palatine hath her court, 
whom, and the countess in company with her, 
it was especially upon us to visit." Thus 
they went, ministering to high and low alike, 
in their democratic Christian way making no 
distinction between tavern-keepers and prin- 
cesses. As they talked with Elizabeth and 
her friend the countess, discoursing upon 
heavenly themes, they were interrupted by 
the rattling of a coach, and callers were 



PENN'S POLITICAL LIFE 61 

announced. The countess " fetched a deep 
sigh, crying out, ' O the cumber and entan- 
glements of this vain world ! They hinder 
all good.' Upon which," ssljs William, " I 
replied, looking her steadfastly in the face, 
' O come thou out of them, then.' " This 
journey was of great importance as affecting 
afterwards the population of Pennsylvania. 
Here it was that Penn met various com- 
munities " of a separating and seeking turn 
of mind," who found in him a kindred spirit. 
When he established his colony, many of 
them came out and joined it, becoming the 
"Pennsylvania Dutch." 

During these travels Penn wrote letters to 
the Prince Elector of Heidelberg, to the Graf 
of Bruch and Falschenstein, to the King of 
Poland, together with an epistle " To the 
Churches of Jesus throughout the world." 
This was a kind of correspondence in which 
he delighted. Like Wesley, after him, he 
had taken the world for his parish. He con- 
sidered himself a citizen of the planet, and 
took an episcopal and pontifical interest in the 
affairs of men and nations. He combined 



62 WILLIAM PENN 

in an unusual way tlie qualities of the saint 
and the statesman. His mind was at the 
same time religious and political. Accord- 
ingly, as he came to have a better acquaint- 
ance with himself, he entered deliberately 
upon a course of life in which these two 
elements of his character could have free 
play. He applied himself to the task of 
making politics contribute to the advance- 
ment of religion. Many men before him 
had been eminently successfid in making 
politics contribute to the advancement of the 
church. Penn's purpose was deeper and 
better. 

He came near, at this time, to getting Par- 
liament to assent to a provision permitting 
Quakers to affirm, without oath ; but the 
sudden proroguing of that body prevented. 
In the general election which followed, he 
made speeches for Algernon Sidney, who 
was standing for a place in Parliament." He 
wrote "England's Great Interest in the 
Choice of a New Parliament," and " One Pro- 
ject for the Good of England." The project 
was that Protestants should stop contending 



PENN'S POLITICAL LIFE 63 

one with another and unite against a com- 
mon enemy. 

This was in 1679. The next year he 
took the decisive step. He entered upon 
the fulfillment of that great plan, which had 
been in his mind since his student days at 
Oxford, and with which he was occupied all 
the rest of his life. He began to undertake 
the planting of a colony across the sea. 

Penn had already had some experience in 
colonial affairs. With the do\vnfall of the 
Dutch dominion in the New World, England 
had come into possession of two important 
livers, the Hudson and the Delaware, and of 
the countries which they drained. Of these 
estates, the Duke of York had become owner 
of New Jersey. He, in turn, dividing it into 
two portions, west and east, had sold West 
Jersey to Lord Berkeley, and East Jersey 
to Sir George Carteret. Berkeley had sold 
West Jersey to a Quaker, John Fenwick, in 
trust for another Quaker, Edward By Hinge. 
These Quakers, disagreeing, had asked Penn 
to arbitrate between them. Byllinge had 
fallen into bankruptcy, and his lands had been 



64 WILLIAM PENN 

transferred to Penn as receiver for the bene- 
fit of the creditors. Thus William had come 
into a position of importance in the affairs 
of West Jersey. Presently, in 1679, East 
Jersey came also into the market, and Penn 
and eleven others bought it at auction. 
These twelve took in other twelve, and the 
twenty-four appointed a Quaker governor, 
Robert Barclay. 

Now, in 1680, having had his early interest 
in America thus renewed and strengthened, 
Penn found that the king was in his debt 
to the amount of sixteen thousand pounds. 
Part of this money had been loaned to the 
king by William's father, the admiral ; part 
of it was the admiral's unpaid salary. Mr. 
Pepys has recorded in his diary how scandal- 
ously Charles left his officers unpaid. The 
king, he says, could not walk in his own 
house without meeting at every hand men 
whom he was ruining, while at the same time 
he was spending money prodigally upon his 
pleasures. Pepys himself fell into poverty 
in his old age, accounting the king to be in 
debt to him in the sum of twenty-eight thou- 
sand pounds. 



PENN'S POLITICAL LIFE 65 

Penn considered his account collectible. 
" I have been," he wrote, " these thirteen 
years the servant of Truth and Friends, and 
for my testimony's sake lost much, — not only 
the greatness and preferment of the world, 
but sixteen thousand pounds of my estate 
which, had I not been what I am, I had long 
ago obtained." It is doubtful, however, if 
the king would have ever paid a penny. It 
is certain that when William offered to ex- 
change the money for a district in America, 
Charles agreed to the bargain with great joy. 

The territory thus bestowed was " all that 
tract or part of land in America, bounded on 
the east by the Delaware River, from twelve 
miles northward of New Castle town unto the 
three and fortieth degree of northern latitude. 
The said land to extend westward five de- 
grees in longitude, to be computed from the 
said eastern bounds, and the said lands to 
be bounded on the north by the beginning of 
the three and fortieth degree of northern lat- 
itude and on the south by a circle dra^vn 
at twelve miles distance from New Castle, 
northward and westward, unto the beginning 



66 WILLIAM PENN 

of tlie fortieth degi*ee of northern latitude, 
and then by a straight hne westward to the 
limits of longitude above mentioned." 

This was a country almost as large as Eng- 
land. No such extensive domain had ever 
been given to a subject by an English sover- 
eign : but none had ever been paid for by a 
sum of money so substantial. 

On the 4th of March, 1681, the charter 
received the signature of Charles the Second. 
On the 21st of August, 1682, the Duke of 
York signed a deed whereby he released the 
tract of land called Pennsylvania to William 
Penn and his heirs forever. About the same 
time, by a like deed, the duke conveyed to 
Penn the district which is now called Dela- 
ware. Penn agreed, on his part, as a feudal 
subject, to render yearly to the king two skins 
of beaver, and a fifth part of all the gold and 
silver found in the ground ; and to the duke 
" one rose at the feast of St. Michael the 
Archangel." 

This association of sentiment and religion 
with a transaction in real estate is a fitting 
symbol of the spirit in which the Pennsyl- 



PENN'S POLITICAL LIFE 67 

vania colony was undertaken Penn received 
the land as a sacred trust. It was regarded 
by him not as a personal estate, but as a re- 
ligious possession to be held for the good of 
humanity, for the advancement of the cause of 
freedom, for the furtherance of the kingdom 
of heaven. He wrote at the time to a friend 
that he had obtained it in the name of God, 
that thus he may " serve his truth and people, 
and that an example may be set up to the 
nations. He believed that there was room 
there " for such an holy experiment." 



VI 



THE SETTLEMENT OF PENNSYLVANIA: PENN S 
FIRST VISIT TO THE PROVINCE 

That Penn undertook the "lioly experi- 
ment " without expectation or desire of 
profit appears not only in his conviction 
that he was thereby losing sixteen thousand 
pounds, but in his refusal to make his new 
estates a means of gain. " He is offered 
great things," says James Clay pole in a let- 
ter dated September, 1681, "£6000 for a 
monopoly in trade, which he refused. . . . 
He designs to do things equally between all 
parties, and I believe truly does aim more 
at justice and righteousness and spreading 
of truth than at his own particular gain." 
" I would not abuse His love," said Penn, 
" nor act unworthy of His providence, and 
so defile what came to me clean. No, let 
the Lord guide me by His wisdom, and pre- 
serve me to honour His name, and serve 



SETTLEMENT OF PENNSYLVANIA 69 

His truth and people, that an example and 
standard may be set up to the nations." 

So far removed was he from all self- 
seeking, that he was even unwilling to have 
the colony bear his name. " I chose New 
Wales," he says, recounting the action of 
the king's council, " being, as this, a pretty 
hilly country, — but Penn being Welsh for 
head, as Pennanmoire in Wales, and Pen- 
rith in Cumberland, and Penn in Bucking- 
hamshire, the highest land in England — 
[the king] called this Pennsylvania, which 
is the high or head woodlands ; for I pro- 
posed, when the secretary, a Welshman, 
refused to have it called New Wales, Syl- 
vania, and they added Penn to it ; and 
though I much opposed it, and went to the 
king to have it struck out and altered, he 
said it was past, and he would take it upon 
him ; nor could twenty guineas move the un- 
der-secretary to vary the name, for I feared 
lest it should be looked on as a vanity in 
me, and not as a respect in the king, as it 
truly was, to my father, whom he often 
mentions with praise." 



70 WILLIAM PENN 

The charter gave the land to Penn as the 

king's tenant. He had power to make laws ; 
though this power was to be exercised, 
except in emergencies, " with the advice, 
assent, and approbation of the freemen of 
the territory," and subject to the confirma- 
tion of the Privy Council. He was to ap- 
point judges and other officers. He had the 
right to assess custom on goods laden and 
imladen, for his own benefit ; though he was 
to take care to do it " reasonably," and with 
the advice of the assembly of freemen. He 
was, at the same time, to be free from any 
tax or custom of the king, except by his own 
consent, or by the consent of his governor 
or assembly, or by act of Parliament. He 
was not to maintain correspondence with 
any king or power at war with England, nor 
to make war against any king or power in 
amity with the same. If as many as twenty 
of his colonists should ask a minister from 
the Bishop of London, such minister was to -» 
be received without denial or molestation. 

The next important document to be pre- 
pared was the Constitution, or Frame of 



SETTLEMENT OF PENNSYLVANIA 71 

Government, and to the task of composing 
it Penn gave a great amount of time and 
care. It was preceded by two statements 
of principles, — the Preface and the Great 
Fundamental. 

The Preface declared the political policy 
of the proprietor. " Government," he said, 
" seems to me a part of religion itself, a thing 
sacred in its institution and end." As for 
the debate between monarchy, aristocracy, 
and democracy, " I choose," he said, " to 
solve the controversy with this small distinc- 
tion, and it belongs to all three : any gov- 
ernment is free to the people under it, 
whatever be the frame, where the laws rule, 
and the people are a party to those laws." 
His purpose, he says, is to establish " the 
great end of all government, viz., to support 
power in reverence with the people, and to 
secure the people from the abuse of power, 
that they may be free by their just obedi- 
ence, and the magistrates honourable for 
their just administration ; for liberty without 
obedience is confusion, and obedience with- 
out liberty is slavery." 



72 WILLIAM PENN 

In a private letter, written about the same 
time, Penn stated his political position in 
several concrete sentences which inter23ret 
these fine but rather vague pronouncements. 
" For the matters of hberty and privilege," 
he wrote, " I propose that which is extraor- 
dinary, and to leave myself and successors 
no power of doing mischief, that the will of 
one man may not hinder the good of an 
whole country ; but to publish these things 
now and here, as matters stand, would not 
be wise." 

The Great Fimdamental set forth the 
ecclesiastical policy of the founder : "In 
reverence to God, the father of light and 
spirits, the author as well as the object of 
all divine knowledge, faith and workings, I 
do, for me and mine, declare and establish 
for the first fundamental of the government 
of my province, that every person that doth 
and shall reside there shall have and enjoy 
the free profession of his or her faith and ex- 
ercise of worship towards God, in such way 
and manner as every such person shall in 
conscience believe is most acceptable to God." 



SETTLEMENT OF PENNSYLVANIA 73 

These principles of civil and religious 

liberty constituted the "holy experiment." 

They made the difference between Penn's 

colony and almost every other government 

then existing^. In their influence and contin- 

uance, until at last they were incorporated in 

the Constitution of the United States, they 

are the chief contribution of William Penn 

to the progress of our institutions. 

" All Europe with amazement saw 
The soul's high freedom trammeled by no law." 

The Constitution was drawn up in Articles 
to the number of twenty-four, and these were 
followed by forty Laws. 

The Articles provided for a governor, to 
be appointed by the proprietor, and for two 
legislative bodies, a provincial council and a 
general assembly. The provincial council 
was to consist of seventy-two members. Of 
these a third were elected for three years, a 
tliird for two, and a third for one ; so that by 
the end of the service of the first third, all 
would have a three-year term, twenty-four 
going out and having their places filled each 
year. The business of the council was to pre- 



74 WILLIAM PENN 

pare laws, to see that they were executed, and 
in general to provide for the good conduct 
of affairs. The general assembly was to con- 
sist of two hundred members, to be chosen 
annually. They had no right to originate 
legislation, but were to pass upon all bills 
which had been enacted by the council, 
accepting or rejecting them by a vote of 
yea or nay. 

The Laws enjoined that " all persons who 
confessed the one almighty and eternal God 
to be the Creator, Upholder, and Ruler of 
the world, and who held themselves obliged 
in conscience to live peaceably and justly in 
society, were in no ways to be molested for 
their religious persuasion and practice, nor to 
be compelled at any time to frequent any reli- 
gious place or ministry whatever." All chil- 
dren of the age of twelve were to be taught 
some useful trade. All pleadings, processes, 
and records in the courts of law were to be 
as short as possible. The reformation of the 
offender was to be considered as a great part 
of the purpose of punishment. At a time 
when there were in England two hundred 



SETTLExMENT OF PENNSYLVANIA 75 

offenses punishable b}^ death, Penn reduced 
these capital crimes to two, murder and trea- 
son. All prisons were to be made into 
workhouses. No oath was to be required. 
Drinking healths, selling rum to Indians, 
cursing and lying, fighting duels, playing 
cards, the pleasures of the theatre, were all 
put under the ban together. 

Penn's provincial council suggested the 
Senate of the United States. As originally 
established, however, the disproportion of 
power between the upper and the lower house 
was so great as to cause much just dissat- 
isfaction. The council was in effect a body 
of seventy-two governors ; the assembly, 
which more directly represented the people, 
could consider no laws save those sent down 
to them by the council. The Constitution 
had to be changed. 

One of the good qualities of the Constitu- 
tion was that it was possible to change it. 
It provided for the process of amendment. 
That customary article with which all consti- 
tutions now end appeared for the first time 
in Penn's Frame of Government. Another 



76 WILLIAM PENN 

good quality of the Constitution was that it 
secured an abiding harmony between its fun- 
damental statements and all further legisla- 
tion. " Penn was the first one to hit upon 
the foundation or first step in the true prin- 
ciple, now the universal law in the United 
States, that the unconstitutional law is 
void." 

Whatever help Penn may have had in the 
framing of this legislation, from Algernon 
Sidney and other political friends, it is plain 
that the best part of it was his own, and 
that he wrote it not as a politician but as a 
Quaker. It is an application of the Quaker 
principles of democracy and of religious lib- 
erty to the conditions of a commonwealth. 
From beginning to end it is the work of a 
man whose supreme interest was religion. 
It is at the same time singularly free from 
the narrowness into which men of this ear- 
nest mind have often fallen. Religion, as 
Penn considered it, was not a matter of or- 
dinances or rubrics. It was righteousness, 
and fraternity, and liberty of conscience. 

In this spirit he wrote a letter to the 



SETTLEMENT OF PENNSYLVANIA 77 

Indian inhabitants of his province. " The 
great God, who is the power and wisdom 
that made you and me, incline your hearts to 
righteousness, love, and peace. This I send 
to assure you of my love, and to desire you to 
love my friends ; and when the great God 
brings me among you, I intend to order all 
things in such a manner that we may all live 
in love and peace, one with another, which 
I hope the great God will incline both me 
and you to do. I seek nothing but the 
honour of his name, and that we, who are 
his workmanship, may do that which is 
well pleasing to him. ... So I rest in the 
love of God that made us." 

Now colonists began to seek this land of 
peace across the sea. A hundred acres were 
promised for forty shillings, with a quit-rent 
of one shilling annually to the proprietor for- 
ever. In clearing the ground, care was to 
be taken to leave one acre of trees, for every 
five acres cleared. All transactions with the 
Indians were to be held in the public market, 
and aU differences between the white man 
and the red were to be settled by a jury of 



78 WILLIAM PENN 

six planters and six Indians. Penn also 
counseled prospective colonists to consider 
the great inconveniences wliich they must 
of necessity endure, and hoped that those 
who went would have " the permission if not 
the good liking of their near relations." 

There were already in the province some 
two thousand people, besides Indians, — a 
peaceable and industrious folk, mostly 
Swedes and English. They had six meet- 
ing-houses ; the English settlers being Quak- 
ers. They lived along the banks of the Del- 
aware. In the autumn of 1681, the ship 
Sarah and John brought the first of Penn's 
emigrants, and in December the ship Bris- 
tol Factor added others. In 1682, Penn 
came himself. 

The journey at that time was both long 
and perilous. If it was accomplished in 
two months, the voyage was considered pros- 
perous. To the ordinary dangers of the 
deep was added the terror of the smallpox. 
Scarcely a ship crossed without this dread 
passenger. William, accordingly, as one 
undertaking a desperate adventure, took a 



PENN'S FIR8T VISIT 79 

tender leave of his family. He wrote a let- 
ter whose counsels might guide them in case 
he never returned. " My dear wife and 
children," he said, " my love, which neither 
sea, nor land, nor death itself can extinguish 
or lessen towards you, most endearedly visits 
you with eternal embraces, and will abide 
with you forever ; and may the God of my 
life watch over you, and bless you, and do 
you good in this world and forever." " Be 
diligent," he advised his wife, " in meetings 
for worship and business, . . . and let meet- 
ings be kept once a day in the family to wait 
upon the Lord, . . . and, my dearest, to 
make thy family matters easy to thee, divide 
thy time and be regular; it is easy and 
sweet. . . . Cast up thy income, and see 
what it daily amounts to, . . . and I beseech 
thee to live low and sparingly, till my debts 
are paid." As for the children, they are to 
be bred up " in the love of virtue, and that 
holy plain way of it, which we have lived in, 
that the world in no part of it get into my 
family." They are to be carefully taught. 
*' For their learning be liberal, spare no 



80 WILLIAM PENN 

cost." "Agriculture is especially in my 
eye ; let my children be husbandmen and 
housewives ; it is industrious, healthy, hon- 
est, and of good example." They are to 
honor and obey their mother, to love not 
money nor the world, to be temperate in all 
things. If they come presently to be con- 
cerned in the government of Pennsylvania, 
" I do charge you," their father vrrote, " be- 
fore the Lord God and the holy angels, that 
you be lovely, diligent and tender, fearing 
God, loving the people, and hating covetous- 
ness. Let justice have its impartial course, 
and the law free passage. Though to your 
loss, protect no man against it ; for you are 
not above the law, but the law above you. 
Live the lives yourselves, you would have 
the people live." 

Unhappily, of Guli's children, seven in 
number, four died before their mother, and 
one, the eldest son, Springett, shortly after. 
Springett inherited the devout spirit of his 
parents ; his father wrote an affecting ac- 
count of his pious death. Of the two re- 
maining, WiUiam fell into ways of dissipar 



PENN'S FIRST VISIT 81 

tion, and Letitia married a man whom her 
father disliked. Neither of them had any 
inheritance in Pennsylvania. 

Penn's ship, the Welcome, carried a hun- 
dred passengers, most of them Quakers from 
his own neighborhood. A third part died 
of small])ox on the way. On the 24th of 
October, he sighted land ; on the 27 th, he 
arrived before Newcastle, in Delaware ; on 
the 28th, he landed. Here he formally re- 
ceived turf and twig, water and soil, in token 
of his ownership. On the 29th, he entered 
Pennsylvania. Adding ten days to this date, 
to bring it into accord with our present calen- 
dar, we have November 8 as the day of his 
arrival in the province. The place was Up- 
land, where there was a settlement already ; 
the name was that day changed to Chester. 

Penn was greatly pleased with his new 
possessions. He wrote a description of the 
country for the Free Society of Traders. 
The air, he said, was sweet and clear, and 
the heavens serene. Trees, fruits, and flow- 
ers grew in abundance : especially a " great, 
red grape," and a " white kind of muskadel," 



82 WILLIAM PENN 

out of which he hopes it may be possible to 
make good wine. The gromid was fertile. 
The Indians he found to be tall, straight, 
and well built, walking " with a lofty chin." 
Their language was " like the Hebrew," and 
he guessed that they were descended from 
the ten lost tribes of Israel. Light of heart, 
they seemed to him, with " strong affections, 
but soon spent ; . . . the most merry crea- 
tures that live." Though they were " under 
a dark night in things relating to religion," 
yet were they believers in God and immor- 
tality. 

" I bless the Lord," he wrote in a letter, 
"I am very well, and much satisfied with 
my place and portion. O how sweet is the 
quiet of these parts, freed from the anxious 
and troublesome solicitations, hurries, and 
solicitations of woeful Europe ! " 

In the midst of these fair regions, beside 
the " wedded rivers," the Delaware and the 
Schuylkill, in the convenient neighborhood 
of quarries of building stone, at a place 
which the Indians called Coaquannoc, he 
established his capital city, calling it Phila- 



PENN'S FIRST VISIT 83 

delphia, — perhaps in token of the spirit 
of brotherly love in which it was founded, 
perhaps in remembrance of those seven 
cities of the Revelation wherein was that 
primitive Christianity which he wished to 
reproduce. 

Here he had his rowers run his boat 
ashore at the mouth of Dock Creek, which 
now runs under Dock Street, where several 
men were engaged in building a house, 
which was afterwards called the Blue An- 
chor Tavern. Penn brought a considerable 
company with him. In the minutes of a 
Friends' meeting held on the 8th (18th) 
of November, 1682, at Shackamaxon, now 
Kensington, it was recorded that, " at this 
time, Governor Penn and a multitude of 
Friends arrived here, and erected a city 
called Philadelphia, about half a mile from 
Shackamaxon." Presently, the Indians ap- 
peared. They offered Penn of their hominy 
and roasted acorns, and, after dinner, showed 
him how they could hop and jump. He is 
said to have entered heartily into these exer- 
cises, and to have jumped farther than any 
of them. 



84 WILLIAM PENN 

The governor had abeady determined the 
plan of the city. There were to be two 
large streets, — one fronting the Delaware 
on the east, the other fronting the Schuyl- 
kill on the west ; a third avenue, to be 
called High Street (now Market), was to 
run from river to river, east and west ; and 
a fourth, called Broad Street, was to cross 
it at right angles, north and south. Eight 
streets were to lie parallel with High, and 
to be named First Street, Second Street, and 
so on in order, in the plain Quaker fash- 
ion which had thus entitled the days of the 
week and the months of the year. Twenty 
were to lie parallel with Broad, and to be 
called after the trees of the forest, — Spruce, 
Chestnut, Pine. In the midst of the city, 
at the crossing of High and Broad Streets, 
was to be a square of ten acres, to contain 
the public offices ; and in each quarter of 
the city was to be a similar open space for 
walks. The founder intended to allow no 
house to be built on the river banks, keep- 
ing them open and beautiful. Coidd he 
have foreseen the future, he would have 



PENN'S FIRST VISIT 85 

made the streets wider. He had in mind, 
however, only a country town. " Let every 
house be placed," he directed, " if the person 
pleases, in the middle of its plot, as to the 
breadth way of it, that so there may be 
ground on each side for gardens or orchards 
or fields, that it may be a green country 
town, which will never be burnt and always 
wholesome." 

Among those houses was his own, a mod- 
est structure made of brick, standing " on 
Front Street south of the present Market 
Street," and still preserved in Fairmont 
Park. He afterwards gave it to his daugh- 
ter Letitia, and it was called Letitia House, 
from her ownership. 

In the mean time, he was making his 
famous treaty with the Indians. Penn rec- 
ognized the Indians as the actual owners 
of the land. He bought it of them as he 
needed it. The transfer of property thus 
made was a natural occasion of mutual 
promises. As there were several such meet- 
ings between the Quakers and the Indians, 
it is difficult to fix a date to mark the fact. 



86 WILLIAM PENN 

One meeting took place, it is said, under a 
spreading elm at Shackamaxon. The com- 
monly accepted date is the 23d of June, 
1683. The elm was blown down in 1810. 
There is a persistent tradition to the effect 
that William was distinguished from his 
fellow Quakers in this transaction by wear- 
ii4g a sky-blue sash of silk network. But 
of this, as of most other details of ceremony 
in connection with the matter, we know 
nothing. 

Penn gives a general description of his 
various conferences upon this business. 
" Their order," he says, " is thus : the king 
sits in the middle of a half -moon, and has 
his council, the old and wise, on each hand. 
Behind them, or at a little distance, sit the 
younger fry in the same figure." Then one 
speaks in their king's name, and Penn 
answers. " When the purchase was agreed 
great promises passed between us of kind- 
ness and good neighbourhood, and that the 
English and the Indians must live in love 
as long as the sun gave light, ... at every 
sentence of which they shouted, and said 



PENN'S FIRST VISIT 87 

Amen, in their way." Some earnestness may- 
have been added to these assuring responses 
by the Indians' consciousness of the fact 
that the advantages of the bargain were not 
all on one side. The Pennsylvania tribes 
had been thoroughly conquered by the Five 
Nations. There was little heart left in 
them. But their condition detracts nothing 
from Penn's Christian brotherliness. 

In some such manner the great business 
was enacted. " This," said Yoltaire, " was 
the only treaty between these people and 
the Christians that was not ratified by an 
oath, and that was never broken." That it 
was never broken was the capital fact. 
Herein it differed from a thousand other 
treaties made before or since. In the midst 
of the long story of the misdealings of the 
white men with the red, which begins with 
Cortez and Pizarro, and is still continued in 
the daily newspapers, this justice and hon- 
esty of William Penn is a point of light. 
That Penn treated the Indians as neighbors 
and brothers ; that he paid them fairly for 
every acre of their land ; that the promises 



88 WILLIAM PENN 

which he made were ever after unfailingly 
kept is perhaps his best warrant of abiding 
fame. Like his constitutional establishment 
of civil and religious hberty, it was a direct 
result of his Quaker principles. It was a 
manifestation of that righteousness which he 
was continually preaching and practicing. 

The kindness and courtly generosity which 
Penn showed in his bargains with the In- 
dians is happily illustrated in one of his 
purchases of land. The land was to extend 
" as far back as a man could walk in three 
days." WiUiam walked out a day and a 
half of it, taking several chiefs with him, 
" leisurely, after the Indian manner, sitting 
down sometimes to smoke their pipes, to eat 
biscuit and cheese, and drink a bottle of 
wine." Thus they covered less than thirty 
miles. In 1733, the then governor em- 
ployed the fastest walker he could find, who 
in the second day and a half marked eighty- 
six miles. 

The treaty gave the new colony a sub- 
stantial advantage. The Lenni Lenape, the 
Mingoes, the Shawnees accounted Penn's 



PENN'S FIRST VISIT 89 

settlers as their friends. The word went 
out among the tribes that wkat Penn said 
he meant, and that what he promised he 
would fulfill faithfully. Thus the planters 
were freed from the terror of the forest 
which haunted their neighbors, north and 
south. They could found cities in the wil- 
derness and till their scattered farms with- 
out fear of tomahawk or firebrand. Penn 
himseK went twenty miles from Philadel- 
phia, near the present Bristol, to lay out his 
country place of Pennsbury. 

Ships were now arriving with sober and 
industrious emigrants ; trees were coming 
down, houses were going up. In July, 1683, 
Penn wrote to Henry Sidney, in England, 
reminding him that he had promised to send 
some fruit-trees, and describing the condi- 
tion of the colony. " We have laid out a 
town a mile long and two miles deep. ... I 
think we have near about eighty houses 
built, and about three hundred farms settled 
round the town. . . . We have had fifty sail 
of ships and small vessels, since the last 
summer, in our river, which shows a good 



90 WILLIAM PENN 

beginning." " I am mightily taken with this 
part of the world," he wrote to Lord Cul- 
peper, who had come to be governor of 
Virginia, " I like it so well, that a plenti- 
ful estate, and a great acquaintance on the 
other side, have no charms to remove ; my 
family being once fixed with me, and if no 
other thing occur, I am likely to be an 
adopted American." "Our heads are dull," 
he added, " but our hearts are good and our 
hands strong." 

In the midst of this peace and prosperity, 
however, there was a serious trouble. This 
was a dispute with Lord Baltimore over the 
dividing line between Pennsylvania and Ma- 
ryland. By the inaccuracy of surveyors, the 
confusion of maps, and the indefiniteness of 
charters, Baltimore believed himself entitled 
to a considerable part of the territory which 
was claimed by Penn, including even Phila- 
delphia. The two proprietors had already 
discussed the question without settlement ; 
indeed, it remained a cause of contention 
for some seventy years. As finally settled, 
in 1732, between the heirs of Penn and of 



PENN'S FIRST VISIT 91 

Baltimore, a line was established from Cape 
Heulopen west to a point half way between 
Delaware Bay and Chesapeake Bay ; thence 
north to twelve miles west of Newcastle, 
and so on to fifteen miles south of Philadel- 
phia ; thence due west. The surveyors were 
Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, and 
the line was thus called Mason and Dixon's 
Line. This boundary afterwards parted the 
free States from the slave States. South of 
it was " Dixie." 

Penn now learned that Lord Baltimore 
was on his way to England to lay the ques- 
tion before the Privy Council. The situation 
demanded William's presence. " I am fol- 
lowing him as fast as I can," he wrote to the 
Duke of York, praying " that a perfect stop 
be put to all his proceedings till I come." 
He therefore took leave of his friends in the 
province, commissioned the provincial council 
to act in his stead, and in August, 1684, 
having been two years in America, he em- 
barked for home. 

On board the Endeavour, on the eve of sail- 
ing, he wrote a farewell letter. " And thou. 



92 WILLIAM PENN 

Philadelphia," he said, " the virgin settlement 
of this province, named before thou wert 
born, what love, what care, what service and 
what travail has there been to bring thee 
forth and preserve thee from such as would 
abuse and defile thee ! O that thou mayest 
be kept from the evil that would overwhehn 
thee ; that faithful to the God of mercies in 
the life of righteousness, thou mayest be pre- 
served to the end. My soul prays to God for 
thee that thou mayest stand in the day of 
trial, that thy children may be blessed of the 
Lord, and thy people saved by thy power. 
My love to thee has been great, and the 
remembrance of thee affects mine heart and 
mine eye. The God of eternal strength keep 
and preserve thee to his glory and peace." 



VII 

AT THE COURT OF JAMES THE SECOND, 
AND " IN RETIREMENT " 

When Penn left the province in 1684, he 
expected to return speedily, but he did not 
see that pleasant land again until 1699. 
The fifteen intervening years were filled 
with contention, anxiety, misfortune, and 
various distresses. 

In the winter of 1684-85, Charles II. 
died, and the Duke of York, his brother, 
succeeded him as James II. And James 
was the patron and good friend of Wil- 
liam Penn. But the king was a Roman 
Catholic. One of his first acts upon com- 
ing to the throne was to go publicly to 
mass. He was privately resolved upon mak- 
ing the Poman Church supreme in England. 
Penn was stoutly opposed to the king's re- 
ligion. In his " Seasonable Caveat against 



94 WILLIAM PENN 

Popery," as well as in his other writings, he 
had expressed his dislike with characteristic 
frankness. That he had himself been ac- 
cused of being a Jesuit had naturally im- 
pelled him to use the strongest language to 
belie the accusation. Nevertheless, William 
Penn stood by the king. He sought and 
kept the position of favorite and agent of 
the court. He upheld, and so far as he 
could, assisted, the projects of a reign which, 
had it continued, would probably have con- 
tradicted his most cherished principles, abol- 
ished liberty of conscience, and made an end 
of Quakers. 

This perplexing inconsistency, which is 
the only serious blot on Penn's fair fame, 
appears to have been the result of two con- 
victions. 

He was sure, in the first place, of the 
honesty of the king ; he believed in him with 
all his heart. James had been true to the 
trust reposed in him by William's father. 
He had befriended William, taking him out 
of prison, increasing his estates, granting his 
petitions. " Anybody," said Penn, " that has 



COURT OF JAMES THE SECOND 95 

the least pretense to good-nature, gratitude, 
or generosity, must needs know how to inter- 
pret my access to the king." With his ad- 
vance to the crown James's graciousness had 
increased. He kept great lords waiting with- 
out while he conversed at leisure with the 
Quaker. He liked Penn, and Penn liked 
him. In spite of the disparities in their age, 
rank, and creed, William Penn and James 
Stuart were fast friends, imited by the bond 
of genuine affection. 

It was characteristic of Penn to be blind 
to the faults of his friends. He brought 
great troubles both upon himself and upon 
his colony by his refusal to believe the re- 
ports which were made to him against the 
character of men whom he had appointed 
to office : he was unwilhng to believe evil of 
any man. He fell into bankrujDtcy, and 
even into a debtor's prison, by his blind, un- 
questioning confidence in the agent who 
managed his business. His faith in James 
was of a piece with his whole character. 
He appears to have been temperamentally 
incapable of perceiving the unworthiness of 
anybody whom he liked. 



96 WILLIAM PENN 

Together with this conviction as to the 
king's honesty, and bound up with it, was a 
like belief in the wisdom of the king's plan. 
The king's plan was to remove all disabil- 
ities arising from religion. He purposed 
not only to put an end to the laws under 
which honest men were kept in prison, but 
to abolish the " tests " which prevented a 
Roman Catholic from holding office. And, 
without tarrying for the action of a cautious 
Parliament, his intention was to do these 
things at once by a declaration of the royal 
will. All this was approved by William 
Penn. 

That the laws which disturbed Protestant 
dissenters should be changed, he argiied at 
length in a pamphlet entitled " A Persuasion 
to Moderation." Moderation, as he defined 
it, meant " liberty of conscience to church 
dissenters; " a cause which, with all humility, 
he said, he had undertaken to plead against 
the prejudices of the times. He maintained 
that toleration was not only a right inherent 
in religion, but that it was for the political 
and commercial good of the nation. Repres- 



COURT OF JAMES THE SECOND 97 

sion and persecution, he said, drive men into 
conspiracies. The importing of religious 
distinctions into the affairs of state deprives 
the country of the services of some of its best 
men. His father, upon the occasion of the 
first Dutch war, had submitted to the king 
a list of the ablest sea officers in the kingdom. 
The striking of the names of nonconformists 
from this list had " robbed the king at that 
time of ten men, whose greater knowledge 
and valour, than any other ten of that fleet, 
had, in their room, been able to have saved 
a battle, or perfected a victory." As for a 
declaration of indulgence, Penn deemed it 
" the sovereign remedy of the English con- 
stitution." 

That the "tests " should be removed, he 
urged on James's behalf upon William of 
Orange, to whom he went in Holland on an 
informal commission from the king. Wil- 
liam, by his marriage with James's daughter, 
was heir apparent to the throne of England, 
and his consent was necessary to any serious 
change of national policy. He insisted on 
the tests. Theoretically, Penn was right. 



98 WILLIAM PENN 

The ideal state imposes no religious tests ; 
every good citizen, no matter what his private 
creed may be, is eligible to any office. Prac- 
tically, Penn was wrong, as William of Or- 
ange plainly saw. That prince, as appeared 
afterwards, was as zealous for religious free- 
dom as was Penn himseK; but it was plain 
to him that as matters stood at that time in 
England, it was necessary to enforce the tests 
in order to prevent the rise of an ecclesiasti- 
cal party whose supremacy would endanger 
all that Penn desired. Penn, with his stout 
faith in the king, could not see it. There 
were times, indeed, when he was perplexed 
and troubled. " The Lord keep us in this 
dark day ! " he wrote to his steward at 
Pennsbury. *' Be wise, close, respectful to 
superiors. The king has discharged all 
Friends by a general pardon, and is courte- 
ous, though as to the Church of England, 
things seem pinching. Several Roman Cath- 
olics got much into places in the army, navy, 
court." Nevertheless, the king's plan, as he 
understood it, gave assurance of liberty of 
conscience, and the end of persecution for 
opinion's sake ; and he supported the king. 



COURT OF JAMES THE SECOND 99 

Under these conditions, misled by friend- 
ship, seeing, but not perceiving, Penn per- 
suaded himself that he could excellently 
serve God and his neighbors by becoming a 
courtier. He took a house in London, within 
easy distance of Whitehall, and visited the 
king daily. A great many people therefore 
visited Penn daily ; sometimes as many as 
two hundred were waiting to confer with him. 
They desired that he would do this or that 
for their good with the king. Most of them 
were Quakers ; many were in need of par- 
don, or were burdened by some oppression. 

For example. Sir Robert Stuart of Colt- 
ness had been in exile as a Presbyterian, 
and on his return found his lands in the pos- 
session of the Earl of Arran. He brought 
his case to Penn. Penn went to Arran. 
" What is this, friend James, that I hear 
of thee ? " he said. " Thou hast taken pos- 
session of Coltness's castle. Thou knowest 
that it is not thine." " That estate," Arran 
explained, " I paid a great price for. I re- 
ceived no other reward for my expensive and 
troublesome embassy to France, except this 



II u. 



100 WILLIAM PENN 

estate." "All very well, friend James,'* 
said Penn, " but of this assure thyself, that 
if thou dost not give me this moment an 
order on thy chamberlain for two hundred 
pounds to Coltness to carry him down to his 
native country, and a hundred a year to sub- 
sist on till matters are adjusted, I will make 
it as many thousands out of thy way with 
the king." Arran complied immediately. 

Again, one day after dinner, as they were 
drinking a glass of wine together, one of 
Penn's clients said, " I can tell you how you 
can prolong my life." " I am no physician," 
answered William, " but prithee tell me 
what thou meanest." The client replied 
that a good friend of his. Jack Trenchard, 
was in exile, and " if you," he said, " could 
get him leave to come home with safety and 
honour, the drinking now and then a bottle 
with Jack Trenchard would make me so 
cheerful that it would prolong my life." 
Penn smilingly promised to do what he could, 
and in a month the two friends were drink- 
ing his good health. 

This was the kind of business which he 



COURT OF JAMES THE SECOND 101 

transacted. He had found a way to be of 
eminent service to his neighbors, and espe- 
cially to his Quaker brethren, and he made 
the most of the opportunity. There is no 
evidence that he departed from the disin- 
terested life which he had previously lived. 
He attended the court of King James, as he 
had undertaken the settlement of Pennsyl- 
vania, not for what he coidd get out of it, 
but for the good he could do by means of it. 
What he did, he teUs us, was upon a " prin- 
ciple of charity." " I never accepted any 
commission," he says, " but that of a free 
and common solicitor for sufferers of all sorts 
and in all parties." Neither is there any 
instance of his asking anything to increase 
his own estate or position. 

Indeed, he was losing money ; for the ex- 
penses of life at court were great. Worse 
still, he was losing his good name. His 
Quaker friends found him hard to under- 
stand. It was true that he had cast in his 
lot with them, and had suffered for their 
cause, — he was their great theologian and 
preacher ; but he seemed, nevertheless, to be 



102 WILLIAM PENN 

still a cavalier and a worldly person. They 
heard — though there was no truth in the 
report — that he had set up a military com- 
pany in Pennsylvania. They saw with their 
own eyes that he lived in a style which must 
have seemed to them altogether inconsistent 
with simplicity, and that he consorted with 
courtiers. And they did not like it, — they 
said so frankly. 

As for enemies, the king's favorite had 
many, inevitably. The lords who waited in 
the antechamber while Penn was closeted 
with James did not look pleasantly at him 
when he came out. The stout Protestants, 
who hated the king's ways, and suspected 
the king's designs, could not easily think 
well of one who was so closely in his coun- 
sels. One of Penn's friends told him what 
these people said of him : Your post is too 
considerable for a Papist of an ordinary 
form, and therefore you must be a Jesuit ; 
nay, to confirm that suggestion, it must be 
accompanied with all the circumstances that 
may best give it an air of probability, — as 
that you have been bred at St. Omer's in 



COURT OF JAMES THE SECOND 103 

the Jesuit College ; that you have taken or- 
ders at Rome, and there obtained a dispen- 
sation to marry ; and that you have since 
then frequently officiated as a priest in the 
celebration of the mass, at Whitehall, St. 
James's, and other places." It seems absurd 
enough to us, but many intelligent persons, 
even Archbishop Tillotson of Canterbury, 
believed it. The detail of St. Omer came, 
probably, from a confusion of the name with 
Saumur. The other suspicions grew out of 
Penn's place in the favor of the king. 

It seemed as if nothing could prejudice 
the king's matters in the eyes of Penn. 
Monmouth's rebellion came, and the kmg's 
revenge followed. Judge Jeffreys went on 
his bloody circuit. " About three hundred 
hanged," Penn wrote, " in divers towns of 
the west ; about one thousand to be trans- 
ported. I begged twenty of the king." It 
was all bad, and one regrets to find Penn 
concerned in it. Still, his twenty probably 
fared better than their neighbors. It is 
likely that he sent them to be colonists in 
Pennsylvania. 



104 WILLIAM PENN 

In the matter of the maids of Taunton, 
William seems clearly to have had no part. 
A company of little schoolgirls, led by their 
teacher, had marched in procession to cele- 
brate the landing of Monmouth. For this 
offense their parents were heavily fined, and 
the fines were given to the queen's maids 
of honor. These ladies wrote to a " Mr. 
Penne " to get him to collect them. Macau- 
lay thought that this pardon-broker was 
William Penn. It is flagrantly inconsistent 
with his character, and he has been ade- 
quately vindicated by various writers. The 
agent in this case was probably George 
Penne, a person in that business. 

Penn's course is not so clear in the 
matter of the presidency of Magdalen Col- 
lege. One of the steps in James's plan to 
change the religion of England was to get a 
foothold for teachers of his faith at the uni- 
versities. He intended to capture Oxford 
and Cambridge. He had so far succeeded at 
Oxford as to get possession of Christ Church 
and University College, and, the presidency 
of Magdalen falling vacant, he ordered the 



COURT OF JAMES THE SECOND 105 

fellows to elect a man of his own choice. 
The f eUows refused to obey the order, — 
thereupon Penn, who had at first taken 
their part with the king, advised them to 
surrender. " Mr. Penn," said Dr. Hough, 
representing the fellows, " in this I will be 
plain with you. We have our statutes 
and oaths to justify us in all that we have 
done hitherto ; but, setting this aside, we 
have a religion to defend, and I suppose 
yourself would think us knaves if we would 
tamely give it up. The Papists have al- 
ready gotten Christ Church and University ; 
the present struggle is for Magdalen ; and 
in a short time they threaten they will have 
the rest." 

To this Penn replied with vehemence : 
"That they shall never have, assure your- 
selves ; if once they proceed so far they will 
quicldy find themselves destitute of their 
present assistance. For my part, I have al- 
ways declared my opinion that the prefer- 
ments of the Church should not be put into 
any other hands but such as they are at 
present in ; but I hope you would not have 



106 WILLIAM PENN 

the two universities such invincible bul- 
warks for the Church of England, that none 
but they must be capable of giving their 
children a learned education. I suppose 
two or three colleges will content the Pa- 
pists." Finally, the king's men broke down 
the doors, turned out the professors and stu- 
dents, and gave the king his way. Penn 
was thus the agent of tyranny ; but he was 
an innocent agent. He made a bad blun- 
der ; but lie made it honestly and ignorantly. 
It was in accord with his democratic ideas 
that the universities should be places of in- 
struction for all the people ; he would have 
liked to see not only the Roman Catholics, 
but all the great divisions of religion in 
England represented there. And that fine 
idea misled him. To hold him guilty, here 
or elsewhere, of malice or hypocrisy, is to 
misread his character. He was simply mis- 
taken, — mistaken in the king, mistaken in 
the application of his own principles. 

Meanwhile, the nation at large was mak- 
ing no mistake. The people saw James as 
he was, and detected his designs upon the 



COURT OF JAMES THE SECOND 107 

liberties of England. At last, in April, 
1688, he issued a Declaration of Indulgence. 
He added insult to injury by ordering that 
it should be read in every church in the 
realm. The seven bishops who protested 
were sent to the Tower. Then the end 
came with speed. William of Orange was 
invited into England. The nation welcomed 
him with acclamations. James fled before 
liim into France, where he lived the remain- 
der of an inglorious life. 

This was a hard change for William Penn, 
and he seems to have done nothing to make 
it easier. There were courtiers who passed 
with incredible swiftness from one allegiance 
to the other ; he was not among them. Oth- 
ers fled to France, but he stayed. He was 
arrested. In his examination before the 
Privy Council he declared that he *'had 
done nothing but what he could answer for 
before God and all the princes in the world ; 
that he loved his country and the Protestant 
religion above his life, and had never acted 
against either; that all he had ever aimed 
at in his public endeavors was none other 



108 WILLIAM PENN 

than what the king had declared for [reli- 
gious liberty] ; that King James had always 
been his friend, and his father's friend, and 
that in gratitude he himself was the king's, 
and did ever, as much as in him lay, influ- 
ence him to liis true interest." Penn was 
released. 

The new king began his reign with the 
Toleration Act, which Parliament passed in 
1688, and from which dates the establish- 
ment of actual and abiding religious liberty 
in England. Thus Penn's great purpose 
was accompHshed by one with whom he was 
not in accord. Sometimes a political party 
adopts the projects for which its opponents 
have long labored, and carries them out even 
more vigorously than they had been planned 
originally. The initial reformers are glad 
that their ideals have been realized, but 
their zeal must be uncommonly impersonal 
if the success brings them quite so much joy 
as it logically ought. It is not likely that 
the Toleration Act filled the soul of William 
Penn with great jubilation. Indeed, we 
know that he insisted to the end of his life 



COURT OF JAMES THE SECOND 109 

that James, if lie had been let alone, would 
have done all that William did, and more 
too, and better. 

The years which followed were full of 
trouble. Macaulay says that in 1689 Penn 
was plotting against the government ; but 
the evidence does not suffice to establish 
the fact. The Privy Council, in 1690, con- 
fronted Penn with an intercepted letter to 
him from James, asking for help. But, as 
Penn said, he could not hinder the king 
from writing to him. He added, however, 
with characteristic boldness, that since he 
had loved King James in his prosperity he 
should not hate him in his adversity. He 
was again discharged. 

In that same year, however, James in- 
vaded Ireland, and the situation of his 
friends in England was thereby made in- 
creasingly difficult. Penn was arrested with 
others, and in prison awaited trial for sev- 
eral months. The result was as before, — 
he was found in no offense. But before a 
month had passed, he learned that another 
warrant was out against his liberty. Offi- 



no WILLIAM PENN 

cers went to take liim at the funeral of 
George Fox, but arrived too late. By this 
time he had concluded that the path of pru- 
dence was that which led into a wise retire- 
ment. He hid himself for the space of 
three years. He was publicly proclaimed a 
traitor, and was deprived of the government 
of his colony. He was " hunted up and 
down," he says, " and could never be allowed 
to live quietly in city or country." 

Finally, the government were persuaded 
either that Penn was innocent, or that no 
further danger was to be apprehended from 
him, and several noblemen, interceding with 
the king, procured his pardon. They repre- 
sented his case, he says, as not only hard, 
but oppressive, there being no evidence but 
what " impostors, or those that fled, or that 
have since their pardon refused to verify 
(and asked me pardon for saying what they 
did) alleged against me." The king an- 
nounced that Penn was his old acquaint- 
ance, and that he might follow his business 
as freely as ever, and that for his part he 
had nothing to say to him. 



COURT OF JAMES THE SECOND 111 

Thus again, and at last, the political ac- 
cusations against William Penn came to 
nothing. He had been in a hard position as 
the faithful friend of a dethroned monarch 
in a day when conspiracies were being made 
on every hand. That he should have been 
suspected of treason was inevitable. That 
in his unconcealed affection for James and 
disapproval of William he said imprudent 
things is likely enough. Prudence was not 
one of his virtues. He was never calculat- 
ingly careful of his own welfare. But that 
he was ever untrue to William, or did any 
act, or consented to any, which could rea- 
sonably be called treacherous, is not only 
quite unproved, but is out of accord with 
the true William Penn as he is revealed in 
his writings and in all his life. The only 
fault which has been clearly established 
against him is that of liking James better 
than he liked William. He was a stanch 
friend to his friend ; that is the sum of his 
offending, wherein the only serious regret is 
that his friend was not more worthy of his 
steadfast and unselfish friendship. "At no 



112 WILLIAM PENN 

time in his life," says Mr. Fiske, " does he 
seem more honest, brave, and lovable, than 
during the years, so full of trouble for him, 
that intervened between the accession of 
James and the accession of Anne." 



VIII 

penn's second visit to the province : 
closing years 

The thoughts with which Penn's mind 
was occupied during the years of hiding ap- 
pear in his book, " Some Fruits of Solitude." 
Robert Louis Stevenson found a copy of it 
in a book-shop in San Francisco, and carried 
it in his pocket many days, reading it in 
street-cars and ferry-boats. He found it, he 
says, " in aU places a peaceful and sweet 
companion ; " and he adds, " there is not a 
man living, no, nor recently dead, that could 
put, with so lovely a spirit, so much honest, 
kind wisdom into words." 

" The author blesseth God for his retire- 
ment," so the book begins, " and kisses the 
gentle hand which led him into it; for 
though it should prove barren to the world, 
it can never do so to him. He has now had 
some time he can call his own ; a property 



114 WILLIAM PENN 

he was never so much master of before ; in 
which he has taken a view of himself and 
the world, and observed wherein he hath hit 
and missed the mark. And he verily thinks, 
were he to live his life over again, he could 
not only, with God's grace, serve him, but 
his neighbor and himself, better than he 
hath done, and have seven years of his life 
to spare." 

Government and Religion have the lon- 
gest chapters in this volume of reflections, 
as being the matters in which William was 
most interested. " Happy that king," he 
says, " who is great by justice, and that peo- 
ple who are free by obedience." " Where 
example keeps pace with authority, power 
hardly fails to be obeyed, and magistrates 
to be honoured." *'Let the people think 
they govern, and they will be governed." 
" Religion is the fear of God, and its demon- 
stration good works ; and faith is the root 
of both." " To be like Christ, then, is to be 
a Christian." " Some folk think they may 
scold, rail, hate, rob, and kill too : so it be but 
for God's sake. But nothing in us, unlike 



PENN'S SECOND VISIT 115 

him, can please him." So the book goes, 
page after page, always serious and sensible, 
full of simplicity and kindliness, cheerful 
and brotherly and unfailingly religious. It 
is the work of one who is trying his best to 
live for his brethren and in Christ's spirit. 

Another significant writing of this period 
is Penn's " Plan for the Peace of Europe." 
The calamities of the war then in progress 
on the Continent gave him arguments enough 
for the desirableness of peace. The means 
of peace is justice, and the means of justice 
is government. It is plain to all that a state 
wherein any private citizen might avenge 
himseK upon his neighbor would be a place 
of confusion and distress. " For this cause 
they have sessions, terms, assizes, and parlia- 
ments, to overrule men's passions and re- 
sentments, that they may not be judges in 
their own cause, nor punishers of their own 
wrongs." Penn proposes that the same rela- 
tion between peace and justice which is en- 
forced between citizen and citizen be also 
enforced between nation and nation. " Now," 
he says, " if the sovereign princes of Europe 



116 WILLIAM PENN 

. . . for love of peace and order [would] 
agree to meet by their stated deputies in a 
general Diet, Estates or Parliament and 
there establish rules of justice for sovereign 
princes to observe one to another ; and thus 
to meet yearly, or once in two or three years 
at the farthest, or as they shall see cause, 
and to be stiled, The Sovereign or Imperial 
Diet, Parliament or State of Europe : be- 
fore which Sovereign Assembly should be 
brought all differences depending between 
one sovereign and another that cannot be 
made up by private embassies before the 
sessions begin ; and that if any of the sover- 
eignties that constitute these imperial states 
shall refuse to submit their claim or preten- 
sions to them, or to abide and perform the 
judgment thereof and seek their remedy by 
arms, or delay their compliance beyond the 
time prefixt in their resolutions, all the other 
sovereignties, united as one strength, shall 
compel the submission and performance of 
the sentence, with damages to the suffering 
party, and charges to the sovereignties that 
obliged their submission ; . . . peace would be 



PENN'S SECOND VISIT 117 

procured and continued in Europe." The 
principle of international arbitration, the 
Conference at the Hague, and all like meet- 
ings which shall be held hereafter, are thus 
foreshadowed. 

These two productions of Penn's season 
of retirement — the "Fruits of Solitude," 
and the " Plan for the Peace of Europe " — 
illustrate again the two qualities which make 
him singularly eminent among the founders 
of commonwealths. He was at once a phi- 
losopher and a statesman ; he was interested 
ahke in religion and in politics. There have 
been many politicians to whom religion has 
been of no concern. There have been many 
religious persons in high positions who have 
been so shut in by church walls that they 
have been incapable of a wider outlook ; 
they have accordingly been narrow, preju- 
diced, and often unpractical j^eople ; they 
have been blind to the elemental social fact 
of difference ; they have hated the thought 
of toleration. Penn was almost alone among 
the good men of our era of colonization in 
being at the same time a man of the world 
and a man of the other world. 



118 WILLIAM PENN 

Penn came out of his exile in 1693 bur- 
dened with misfortune. He had been de- 
prived of his government ; he was sadly in 
debt ; he had lost many of his friends. His 
colonists in Pennsylvania declined to lend 
him money. His brethren in England drew 
up a confession of wrong-doing for him to 
sign : " If in any things during those late 
revolutions I have concerned myself either 
by words or writings, in love, pity or good 
will to any in distress [meaning the king] 
further than consisted with Truth's honor or 
the Church's peace, I am sorry for it." But 
he would not sign. To these troubles was 
added a greater grief in the death of his 
wife. " An excellent wife and mother," he 
said of her, " an entire and constant friend, 
of a more than common capacity, and greater 
modesty and humility ; yet most equal and 
undaunted in danger." A brave soul, no 
doubt, as befitted her parentage, and of a 
devout and consecrated spirit. 

But William was ever of a serene and 
cheerful disposition. Neither loss, nor dis- 
appointment, nor bereavement could shut 



PENN'S SECOND VISIT 119 

out the sun. His religious faith strength- 
ened him. " We must needs disorder our- 
selves," he ha^ written in his " Fruits of Soli- 
tude," " if we only look at our losses. But 
if we consider how little we deserve what is 
left, our passions will cool, and our murmurs 
will turn into thankfulness." " Though our 
Saviour's passion is over, his compassion is 
not. That never fails his humble, sincere 
disciples ; in him they find more than all 
that they lose in the world." 

During the six years which followed, this 
strong confidence was justified. He regained 
his government and his good name. He 
also married a second wife, Hannah Callow- 
hill, a strong, sensible, and estimable Quaker 
lady of some means, living in Bristol. 

The only satisfactory information as to the 
personal appearance of Penn in mature life 
is that which is given by Sylvanus Bevan. 
Be van was a Quaker apothecary in London, 
who had a remarkable gift for carving por- 
traits in ivory. After Penn's death, he 
made such a portrait of him from memory. 
The men who had known William liked it 



120 WILLIAM PENN 

greatly. Lord Cobham, to whom Bevan 
sent it, said, " It is William Penn liimself ." 
It represents him in a curled wig, with fuU 
cheeks and a double chin — a pleasant, mas- 
terful, and serious person. Clarkson says 
that in his attire he was " very neat, though 
plain." Penn advised his children to choose 
clothes "neither unshapely nor fantastical ; " 
and he illustrated to King James the differ- 
ence between the Koman Catholic and the 
Quaker religions by the difference between 
his hat and the king's. " The only differ- 
ence," he said, " lies in the ornaments that 
have been added to thine." His dress was 
probably that which was common to gentle- 
men in his day, but without extremes of 
color or adornment. For some time after 
becoming a Quaker he wore his sword, hav- 
ing consulted Fox, who said, " I advise thee 
to wear it as long as thou canst." Presently 
Fox, seeing him without it, said, " William, 
where is thy sword?" To which Penn re- 
plied, " I have taken thy advice : I wore it 
as long as I could." 

The sober cheerfulness of Penn's attire 



PENN'S SECOND VISIT 121 

comported well with liis conversation. It is 
true that Bishop Burnet, who did not like 
him, says that " he had a tedious, luscious 
way of talking, not apt to overcome a man's 
reason, though it might tire his patience." 
But Dean Swift enjoyed him, and testified 
that " he talked very agreeably and with 
great spirit." The Friends of Reading 
Meeting even noted that he was " facetious 
in conversation," and there is a tradition of 
a venerable Friend who spoke of him " as 
having naturally an excess of levity of spirit 
for a gi'ave minister." A handsome, grace- 
ful, and even a merry gentleman it was who 
married Hannah Callowhill. 

For a time he devoted himself again to 
the work of the ministry. He went about, 
as in former days, preaching, sometimes in 
the market-hall, sometimes in the fields. 
Once, in Ireland, the bishop sent an officer 
to disperse the meeting, complaining that 
Penn had left him " nobody to preach to but 
the mayor, church-wardens, a few of the con- 
stables, and the bare walls." 

His heart, however, was in his province. 



123 WILLIAM PENN 

The affairs of Pennsylvania had been going 
bacUy. There had been a hot contention 
between tlie council and the assembly, and 
another between the province and the terri- 
tory. The officials, too, whom Penn had 
appointed, had quarreled among themselves. 
AVilliam complained that they were exces- 
sively " governmentish ; " meaning that they 
liked authority and that they took details 
very seriously. The situation, however, was 
inevitably difficult. In his relation to the 
king, the governor was a feudal sovereign ; 
in his relation to the people he was, by 
Penn's arrangement, the executive of a de- 
mocracy. Penn himself reconciled the two 
positions by his own tact and unselfishness, 
as well as by a certain masterfulness to 
which those about him instinctively and 
willingly yielded. He proved the motto of 
his book-plate, Dum CJavum Teneam ; all 
went well while he with his own hands held 
the helm. But his deputies were not so 
competent. The colony fell into two parties, 
the proprietary and the popular, represent- 
ing these two ideas. Then the governor 



PENN'S SECOND VISIT 123 

whom the king had appointed during Penn's 
retirement was a soldier, and his un-Quaker- 
like notions as to the right conduct of a 
colony brought a new element of confusion 
into affairs which were already sufficiently 
confounded. 

At last, in 1G99, it became possible for 
the founder to make another visit to his pro- 
vince. He brought his family with him, 
evidently intending to stay. Philadelphia 
was now a city of some seven hundred 
houses, and had nearly seven thousand in- 
habitants. The people were at that moment 
in deep depression, having just been visited 
with a plague of yellow fever. The pestilence, 
however, had abated, and Penn was received 
with sober rejoicings. He took up his resi- 
dence in the " slate-roof house," a modest 
mansion which stood on the corner of Second 
Street and Norris Alley ; it was pulled down 
in 1867. 

Now began a season of good government. 
The business of piracy had for some time 
been merrily carried on by various enter- 
prising persons, some of whom lived very 



124 WILLIAM PENN 

respectably in Philadelpliia. William put a 
stop to it. The importing of slaves from 
Africa was at tliat time considered by most 
persons to be a good thing both for the 
planters and for the slaves. Already, how- 
ever, at the Pennsylvania yearly meeting of 
Friends in 1688, some who came from Krie- 
sheim, in Germany, had protested against it, 

" Who first of all their testimonial gave 
Against the oppressor, for the outcast slave." 

And, in consequence, though slaves were 
still imported, they were humanely treated. 
Penn interested himself in the improvement 
of their condition. He was also concerned 
in the progress of the prison reforms which 
he had proposed in the original establish- 
ment of the colony. He employed a watch- 
man to cry the news, the weather, and the 
time of day in the Philadelphia streets. Re- 
garding the Constitution, about which there 
had been so much contention, he addressed 
the council and the assembly in terms of 
characteristic friendliness. "Friends," he 
said, "if in the Constitution by charter 
there be anything that jars, alter it. If you 



PENN'S SECOND VISIT 125 

want a law for this or that, prepare it." He 
advised them, however, not to trifle with 
government, and wished there were no need 
to have any government at all. In general, 
he said, the fewer laws, the better. The re- 
sult was a new Constitution. It provided 
that the council should be appointed by the 
governor, and that the assembly should have 
the right to originate laws. It was more 
simple and workable than the previous legis- 
lation, and lasted until the Revolution. 

Meanwhile, Penn was journeying about 
the country in his old way, preaching. At 
Merion, a small boy of the family where he 
was entertained, being much impressed with 
the great man's looks and speech, peeped 
through the latchet-hole of his chamber door, 
and both saw and heard him at his prayers. 
Near Haverford, a small girl, walking along 
the country road, was overtaken by the gov- 
ernor, who took her up behind him on his 
horse, and so carried her on her way, her 
bare feet dangling by the horse's side. 

Clarkson, the chief of the biographers of 
Penn, who collected these and other inci- 



126 WILLIAM PENN 

dents, gives us a glimpse of him as he ap- 
peared at this time at Quaker meetings. 
" He was of such humihty that he used gen- 
erally to sit at the lowest end of the space 
allotted to ministers, always taking care to 
place above himself poor ministers, and those 
who appeared to him to be peculiarly gifted." 
He liked to encourage young men to speak. 
When he himself spoke, it was in the sim- 
plest words, easy to be understood, and with 
many homely illustrations. At the same 
time, on state occasions, as the proprietor of 
Pennsylvania and representative of the sov- 
ereign, he used some ceremony, marching 
through the Philadelphia streets to the 
opening of the assembly with a mace-bearer 
before him, and having an officer standing 
at his gate on audience days, with a long 
staff tipped with silver. Acquainted with 
affairs, and with a knowledge of the rela- 
tions between government and human na- 
ture drawn from a wide experience, he knew 
the distinction, at which some of his Quaker 
brethren stumbled, between personal humil- 
ity and the proper dignity of official station. 



PENN'S SECOND VISIT 127 

In the intervals left him by the demands 
of church and state, he busied himself with 
the improvement of his place at Pennsbury. 
Here he had a considerable house in the 
midst of pleasant gardens. He took great 
pleasure in personal superintendence of the 
grounds and buildings, planting vines and 
cutting vistas through the trees. " The 
country is to be preferred," he wrote in 
" Fruits of Solitude." " The country is both 
the philosopher's garden and library, in 
which he reads and contemplates the power, 
wisdom, and goodness of God." " The know- 
ledge and improvement of it," he declared, 
is " man's oldest business and trade, and the 
best he can be of." 

Within were silver plate and satin cur- 
tains, and embroidered chairs and couches. 
The proprietor's bed was covered with a 
" quilt of white Holland quilted in green 
silk by Letitia," his daughter. " Send up," 
he writes to James Logan, at Philadelphia, 
" our great stewpan and cover, and little 
soup dish, and two or three pounds of coffee 
if sold in town, and three pounds of wicks 



128 WILLIAM PENN 

ready for candles." Mrs. Penn asks Logan 
to provide " candlesticks, and great candles, 
some green ones, and pewter and earthen 
basins, mops, salts, looking-glass, a piece 
of dried beef, and a firkin or two of good 
butter." 

Penn rode a large white horse, and had a 
coach, with a black man to drive it, and a 
'' rattling leathern conveniency," probably 
smaller, and a sedan chair for Mrs. Penn. 
In the river lay the barge, of which William 
was so fond that he wrote from England to 
charge that it be carefully looked after. 
Somebody expressed surprise one day when 
Penn went out in it against wind and tide. 
" I have been sailing all my life against wind 
and tide," he said. 

Much of the work of the estate was done 
by slaves. The fact troubled the proprietor's 
conscience. He laid it upon his own soul, as 
he did upon the souls of his brethren in the 
colony, " to be very careful in discharging a 
good conscience towards them in all respects, 
but more especially for the good of their 
souls, that they might, as frequent as may 



PENN'S SECOND VISIT 129 

be, come to meeting on first-days." A spe- 
cial meeting was appointed for slaves once 
a month, and their masters were expected 
to come with them. Finally, Penn liberated 
all his slaves. Li his will of 1701, " I give," 
he says, " to my blacks their freedom, as is 
under my hand already, and to old Sam 100 
acres, to be his children's after he and his 
wife are dead, forever." 

The Pennsbury house had a great hall in 
the midst, where the governor in an oak arm- 
chair received his neighbors, the Indians. 
Here they came, in paint and feathers, — 
" Connoondaghtoh, king of the Susquehan- 
nah Indians ; Wopaththa, king of the Shawa- 
nese; Weewinjough, chief of the Ganawese; 
and Ahookassong, brother of the emperor of 
the five nations ; " and many other hum- 
bler braves. John Richardson, a Yorkshire 
Quaker, visited Penn at Pennsbury and saw 
them. William gave them match-coats, he 
says, and " some other things," including a 
reasonable supply of rum, which the chiefs 
dispensed to the warriors severally in small 
portions : " So they came quietly, and in a 



130 WILLIAM PENN 

solid manner, and took their draws." He 
did not smoke, a fact which the Indians must 
have noted as a curious eccentricity. Then 
they made a small fire out of doors, and the 
men sat about it in a ring, singing " a very 
melodious hymn," beating the ground be- 
tween the verses with short sticks, and, after 
a circling dance, departed. Penn got on 
most happily with the Indians. The peace- 
ful Quakers went about unarmed and were 
never in danger. The only disorderly folk 
thereabout were white men. 

In the midst of these rural joys, news came 
that a movement was on foot to put an end 
to proprietary governments, thereby bringing 
all colonies under the immediate control of 
the crown. Penn felt that it was necessarj?- 
for him to return to England to block this 
inconvenient legislation. On the 28th of 
October, he assembled the citizens of Phila- 
delphia, and presented them with a charter 
for their city. In the Friends' meeting, he 
said that he " looked over all infirmities and 
outwards, and had an eye to the regions of 
the spirit, wherein was our sweetest tie." 



PENN'S SECOND VISIT 131 

Then, says Norris, " in true love he took his 
leave of us." Thus, after two years wherein 
peace and quietness prevailed over all mis- 
understanding and opposition, he set sail in 
1701, and never saw Pennsylvania again. 

His house at Pennsbury fell into ruins, — 
due in large part to the leakage of a leaden 
reservoir on the roof, — and was taken down 
before the Revolution. The furniture was 
gradually dispersed. For some years it was 
" deemed a kind of pious stealth," among 
those who were most loyal to the proprietor, 
to carry away something out of the house 
when they chanced to visit its empty halls. 
One gentleman rejoiced in the possession 
of the mantelpiece; another had a pair of 
Penn's plush breeches. 

William Penn's four years of actual resi- 
dence gave him all the satisfaction which he 
ever got from his colonial possessions. All 
else was worry, labor, and expense. The 
province was a sore financial burden. As 
proprietor he was charged with the payment, 
in large part, of the expenses of government. 
The returns from rents and sales were slow 



132 WILLIAM PEXN 

and uncertain. The taxes on imports and 
exports, to which he had a charter right, he 
had generously declined. When he asked 
the assembly, in remembrance of that liber- 
ality, to send him money in his financial 
straits, they were not minded to respond. 
Penn belonged to that high fraternity of 
noble souls who do not know how to make 
bargains. His impulses were generous to a 
fault, and he had an invincible confidence 
that his neighbors would deal with him in 
the same spirit. The consequence was that 
year by year the expenses grew, and there 
was but a slender income. " O Pennsyl- 
vania," he cries, " what hast thou cost me ? 
Above thirty thousand pounds more than I 
ever got by it ; two hazardous and most 
fatiguing voyages, my straits and slavery 
here, and my child's soul, almost." 

The last allusion is to Guli's son, William, 
whose dissipation Penn always attributed to 
a lack of fatherly care during his first visit 
to the province. Penn finally sent the boy 
to Pennsbury, hoping that the quiet, the ab- 
sence of temptation, and the wholesome joys 



CLOSING YEARS 133 

of a country life, might amend him. But 
William went from bad to worse, was ar- 
rested in Philadelphia in a tavern brawl, was 
formally excommunicated by the Quakers, 
and came home to England to give his 
father further pain. 

To the financial burdens of the province 
were added the difficulties of government. 
Penn succeeded very well in keeping his 
colony, — he defended his boundaries against 
Lord Baltimore, and he defeated those who 
would have taken away his ride and given 
it to the king ; but the governing of the col- 
ony across three thousand miles of sea was 
another matter. The moment he withdrew 
the restraining influence of his personal pre- 
sence, all manner of contentions came into 
the light of day. 

The question of the prudence of bearing 
arms was vigorously debated. James Logan, 
secretary of the province, and Penn's ablest 
counselor, urged the need of military de- 
fenses. Conservative Friends opposed it. 

Churchmen had been settling in the pro- 
vince. One of William's oldest friends, 



134 WILLIAM PENN 

George Keith, who had accompanied him 
on his religious mission to Holland, had gone 
into the Episcopal ministry. Logan says, 
in a letter to Penn, that " not suffering them 
to be superior " was accounted by the church- 
men as the equivalent of persecution. 

Colonel Quarry, a judge of the admiralty, 
appointed by the British government to en- 
force the navigation laws in the colony, was 
responsible to the Board of Trade in Lon- 
don, and independent of the governor and 
of the assembly. He exercised his office of 
critic and censor to the annoyance of Penn. 

To these various sources of trouble was 
added an unending strife between the gov- 
ernor's deputy and the people. Penn's habit 
of looking always on the best side made him 
a bad judge of men, and the deputies whom 
he sent were few of them competent ; some 
were not even respectable. Penn, with his 
characteristic invincible blindness, took their 
part. 

Finally, the disputations, protests, and 
complaints, with direct attacks upon Penn's 
interests, and even upon his character, got 



CLOSING YEARS 135 

to such a pass that he addressed a letter of 
expostulation to the people. "When it 
pleased God to open a way for me to settle 
that colony," he wrote, " I had reason to ex- 
pect a solid comfort from the services done 
to many hundreds of people. . . . But, alas ! 
as to my part, instead of reaping the like 
advantages, some of the greatest of my trou- 
bles have sprung from thence. The many 
combats I have engaged in, the great pains 
and incredible expense for your weKare and 
ease, to the decay of my former estate . . . 
with the undeserved opposition I have met 
with from thence, sink into me with sorrow, 
that, if not supported by a superior hand, 
might have overwhelmed me long ago. And 
I cannot but think it hard measure, that, 
while it has proved a land of freedom and 
flourishing, it should become to me, by 
whose means it was principally made a 
country, the cause of grief, trouble, and 
poverty." 

So heav}^ was the financial burden, and so 
vexatious and disheartening the bickering 
and ingratitude, that Penn thought seriously 



136 WILLIAM PENN 

of selling his governorship ; and it was in 
the market for several years awaiting a pur- 
chaser. Indeed, in 1712, he had so far per- 
fected a bargain to transfer his proprietary 
rights to the crown for XI 2,0 00, that no- 
thing remained to be done save the affixing 
of his signature. Before his name was signed, 
he fell suddenly ill, and the transaction went 
no farther. 

In the midst of these many troubles, in 
themselves serious enough, there came an- 
other. Penn's business manager for his 
estates in England and Ireland was Phihp 
Ford. For a long time, Ford's payments 
had been less and less ; Penn was continu- 
ally complaining that he got so little from 
his property. Still, Ford's accounts went 
without examination, and some of his finan- 
cial reports were not so much as opened. 
William had his customary confidence in his 
agent's honesty. At last, when things got 
so bad that something had to be done, it 
appeared by Ford's books that, instead of 
Ford's being in debt to Penn, Penn was in 
debt to him for more than ten thousand 



CLOSING YEARS 137 

pounds. This was the result of long, inge- 
nious, and unmolested bookkeeping. And 
Penn had made himself liable by his care- 
less silence. Then Ford died, and his widow 
and children claimed everything which stood 
in Penn's name. Penn, it appeared, had 
borrowed money of Ford, and had given 
him a mortgage on his Pennsylvania estates 
as security. When the loan was paid, the 
mortgage had not been returned. Not only 
did Mrs. Ford retain it, but she sued Penn 
for three thousand pounds rent, which was 
due, she said, from the property of which 
William was once owner, but which he now 
held as tenant of the Fords. So far was 
this iniquitous business pursued, that Penn 
was arrested as he was at a religious meet- 
ing in Gracechurch Street, and was impris- 
oned for debt in the Fleet, or its precincts. 

This was the turn in the tide. Every- 
body disapproved of treatment so unjust 
and extortionate. William's friends raised 
money, and made a compromise with the 
Fords, and got him free. In Pennsylvania, 
too, the contentions were quieted by a good 



138 WILLIAM PENN 

governor. And as the wars came to an end, 
trade so increased that the province pre- 
sently yielded a substantial income. 

Penn retired to Ruscombe, in Berkshire, 
in the pleasant country. Here he had his 
family about him. He was now a grand- 
father, his son William having a son and a 
daughter. " So that now we are major, 
minor, and minimus. I bless the Lord mine 
are pretty well, — Johnny lively ; Tommy a 
lovely, large child ; and my grandson, Sprin- 
gett, a mere Saracen ; his sister, a beauty." 
Of his second marriage there were six chil- 
dren, four of whom — John, Thomas, Mar- 
garet, and Richard — became proprietors of 
Pennsylvania. Thomas had two sons, John 
and Granville ; Richard had two, Jolm and 
Richard. When the proprietary government 
ended, in 1876, it was in the hands of the 
heirs of William Penn. 

In 1711, Penn wrote a preface to John 
Banks's Journal, dictating it, as his custom 
was, walking to and fro with his cane in his 
hand, thumping the floor to mark the em- 
phasis. " Now reader," he concludes, " be- 



CLOSING YEARS 139 

fore I take leave of thee, let me advise thee 
to hold thy religion in the spirit, whether 
thou prayest, praisest or ministerest to oth- 
ers, . . . which, that all God's people may 
do, is, and hath long been the earnest desire 
and fervent supplication of theirs and thy 
faithful friend in the Lord Jesus Christ, 
W. Penn." This is the last word of his 
writing which remains. 

The next year he had a paralytic stroke, 
and another, and another. This impaired his 
memory and his mind. Thus he continued 
for six years, as happily as was possible un- 
der the circumstances. He went often to 
meeting, where he frequently spoke, briefly, 
but with " sound and savory expressions." 
He walked about his gardens, saw his friends, 
and delighted in the company of his wife 
and children. Each year left him weaker 
than the year before ; but his days were 
filled with serenity. He was surrounded 
with all the comforts which a generous in- 
come, an affectionate family, the respect of 
his neighbors, and the approval of God, 
could give him. 



140 WILLIAM PENN 

" He that lives to live forever," he had 
written in his " Fruits of Solitude," " never 
fears dying. Nor can the means be terrible 
to him, that heartily believes the end. For 
though death be a dark passage, it leads to 
immortality ; and that is recompense enough 
for suffering of it. . . . And this is the com- 
fort of the good, that the grave cannot hold 
them, and that they live as soon as they 
die." 

Into the fullness of this life he entered on 
the 30th of July, 1718, being seventy-four 
years old. 



The chief authorities for facts concerning William 
Penn are — 

1. The Select Works of William Penn (London, 1726 ; 

3d edition, 1782 ; 5 vols). Whereof, The Trial of 
William Penn and William Mead (vol i.), Travels 
in Holland and Germany (vol. iii.), and A General 
Description of Pennsylvania (vol. iv.) contain auto- 
biographical matter. Some Fruits of Solitude and 
Penn's Advice to his Children (vol. v.) are simi- 
larly valuable. 

2. The Life of Penn prefixed to his Works, by Joseph 

Besse, a Quaker contemporary (1726). 

3. Memoirs of the Private and Public Life of William 

Penn, by Thomas Clarkson (London, 1813). 

4. The Pennsylvania Historical Society Memoirs (vols. 

i., ii., iii.). Also the Correspondence between Wil- 
liam Penn and James Logan, edited for this So- 
ciety, by Edward Armstrong. 

5. The Penns and the Penningtons, by Maria Webb 

(London, 1867), containing family letters. 

6. Recent biographies of Penn : by William Hepworth 

Dixon (1851), by Samuel M. Janney (1852), by 
John Stoughton (1882), by Sydney George Fisher 
(1900). 



EUcirotyPed aTtd printed by H. O. Houghton &* Co, 
Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 



/ 



FEB 7 1901 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Bg^ 




li nil mil 

014 311 185 4 






